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NEPOLEON “FRE: CITEEE. 


DEPOSED BY THE WISH OF LAW. 


Zip DESTROVER 
fin SECOND REPUBLIC; 


BEING 


Pe OUBON THE EFEIEE. 
By VICTOR; HUGO. 
L— 


TRANSLATED BY A CLERGYMAN OF THE PROTESTANT EPISCO- 
PAL CHURCH, FROM THE SIXTEENTH FRENCH EDITION. 


NEW YORK: 
Sea EL DON. & COMPANY, 
; 498 AND 500 Broapway. 


1870. 


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1879, 
By SHELDON & COMPANY, 


In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 


Printed by the UNION PRINTING Housn, 


Stereotyped by LITTLE, RENNIE & Co. 
79 John Street, N. Y. 


646 and 647 Broadway, N. Y. 


de. 

= SO 
US Ine 
Qty 


a Ae 
Rima NSLATOR SS! PREFACE, 


WHEN the translator first began spending leisure hours 
on this book, he felt little interest, and would have spoken of 
his occupation in the tone of apology. He was wrong. He 
has almost unconsciously given to the _American public a 
great work full of the burning genius of a great author. _ If 
this volume is not read and valued, it will not be its own fault; 
for if it has any fault, and it has many, the first among them 
appears to him to be the worthy one, that it is too keen in its 
delicate satire, too fine in its exquisite wit for the dull ears, 
or, we should rather say, the dull eyes of too many who 
will look into it. When judged among Victor Hugo’s works, 
it will take rank as one of the most complete. Not possessing 
the sensational and popular interest of a novel, it acquires 
dignity from its purely historical character and intense 
power from the fact that its author was an eye-witness of 
the events which he records, and a participant in the sufferings 
which he resents. Seldom do we have an historical mono- 
gram of more value. When judged on its own merits, with- 
out a comparison with other works by the author, it may be 
said that, notwithstanding its occasional extravagance of style, 
and its continual use of the nominative absolute, making it 
hard for the reader and an affliction to the translator; and 
notwithstanding also its enormous French vanity, occasionally 


swelling to sacred allusions, which in another would be called 


BTL OA 4579 


6 Trauslator's Preface. 


blasphemy, the book is of value in an artistic and scientific 
point of view, as containing passages of incomparable elo- 
quence, as being graphic and readable throughout, and as 
affording in its later portions a masterly analysis of crime. 
As to its moral tone, notwithstanding an occasional coarse 
allusion, it may be said to be everywhere high; that is, 
every argument is based on morals and on conscience, and 
never do we discover the writer yielding a vulgar homage 
to success. Many of its predictions* have been singularly 
although tardily verified, and we can read in the light of 
1870 many prophesies with wonder, which in 1869 would 
have provoked a smile. The translator hopes that the work 
will be of benefit politically and morally, as well as intellectu- 
ally, and as a source of recreation; although he cannot 
agree with all the positions taken in its pages, he does not 
consider any of them so iar astray as to mar the general 
value of its conclusions. As to the character of the transla- 
tion, he may have committed errors through haste, for which 
he will ask pardon; but as to the general plan and style 
in which the work has been completed, those who know 
what is proper in the translation of languages will see that 
they are correct; as to the opinion of others he is not 
anxious. He will add one remark, and only one, and that 
is, that he has endeavored to confine his work to spare 
intervals, and that it has not encroached seriously upon 


| 


consecrated time. 


* The work was first published in 1852. 


HARTFORD, Conn., Nov. 24th, 1870. 


TABLE - OF CONTENTS: 





BOOK FIRST.—THE MAN. 


I. The 20th of December, 1848.—II. Commission of the 
Representatives.—III. Forced to silence.—IV. Men 
will awake.—V. Biography.—VI. Portrait.—VII. To 
make a sequel to the Panegyrics. . . : 9-50 


BOOK SECOND.—THE GOVERNMENT. 

I. The Constitution.—II. The Senate.—III. The Council 
of State and the Corps Legislatif.cIV. The Finan- 
ces.—V. The Liberty of the Press.—VI. Novelties 
in point of legality—VII. The Adherents.— 
VIII. Mens agitat molem.—IX. Omnipotence.— 
X. The two Profiles of M. Bonaparte.— XI. Reca- 
pitulation. - : : . ; : - 51-95 


BOOK THIRD.—THE CRIME. 
Chapter taken from an unpublished, book entited Zhe 
Crime of the 2d of December, by Victor Hugo. 96-140 


BOOK FOURTH.—THE OTHER CRIME. 
I. Sinister Questions.—II. A Succession of Crimes.—III. 
What 1852 might have been.—IV. Jacquerie. 141-175 


BOOK FIFTH.—PARLIAMENTARISM. 

I. 1789.—II. Mirabeau.—III. The Tribune—IV. The 
Orators.—V. Power of Speech.—VI. What the Orator 
is—VII. What the Tribune was doing.—VIII. Par- 
liamentarism.—IX. The Tribune destroyed. 176-199 


8 Contents. 


BOOK SIXTH.—THE ABSOLUTION. 


FIRST FORM: THE 7,500,000 VOTES. 


I. The Absolution.—II. The Stage-coach.—III. Sifting 
of the Vote. The Recalling of Facts.—IV. Who 
really voted for M. Bonaparte.—V. Concession.— 
VI. The Moral Side of the Question.—VII, Expla- 
nation to M. Bonaparte.—VIII. Axioms.—IX. In 
what M. Bonaparte is deceived. ° . » 200-231 


BOOK SEVENTH.—THE ABSOLUTION. 
SECOND FORM: THE OATH. 

I. Upon an oath, an oath and a-half.—Il. Difference of 
prices.—III. The oath of the men of letters and 
science.—IV. Curiosities of the thing.—V. The 
5th of April, 1852.—VI. Oath everywhere. 232-252 


BOOK EIGHTH.—THE PROGRESS INVOLVED IN 
THE COUP DETAT: 

I. The quantity of Good which the Evil contasned.— 
II. The Four Institutions which oppose the Future. 
—III. Slowness of Normal Progress.—IV. What an 
Assembly ought to have done.—V. What Providence 
- has done.—VI. What the Ministers, the Army, the 
Magistracy, and the Clergy did.—VII. God’s forms 

of government. - : - : ° 253-269 


CONCLUSION.—FIRST PART. 
Littleness of the Master, baseness of the Situation. 270-289 
| 


SECOND PART. 


Mourning and Faith. ‘ : : . A 290-308 


MAPOLEON THE LITTLE. 


BOOK FIRST.—THE MAN. 








GH ALRETE-E Reve. 
THE 20TH OF DECEMBER, 1848. 


On Thursday, the 20th of December, 1848, the Constit- 
uent Assembly was in session, surrounded at the moment 
by an imposing array of troops. 

A report of the representative Waldeck Rousseau, made 
in the name of the committee charged with giving an ab- 
stract of the vote for the election to the presidency of the 
Republic, had just been read. In that report one remarked 
this phrase, which summed up all its meaning: ‘‘It is the 
seal of the inviolable power of the nation, that by this per- 
fect execution given to the fundamental law, she plants 
herself on the Constitution, in order to render it holy and 
inviolable.” Following this, in the midst of the profound 
silence of nine hundred constituents, assembled in a mass, 
and almost to the entire number of the body, Armand 
Marrast, the President of the National Constituent Assembly, 
arose and said :— 

“«In the name of the French people : 


‘* Seeing that the citizen Charles-Louis-Napoleon-Bona- 
1* 


10 Napoleon the Little. 


parte, born in Paris, fulfills the conditions of eligibility 
prescribed by the 44th article of the Constitution ; 

‘‘Seeing that in the open ballot held throughout the 
entire extent of this territory of the Republic, for the elec- 
tion of the Président, he has united the absolute majority 
of suffrages ; 

“‘In virtue of the 47th and 48th articles of the Consti- 
tution, the National Assembly proclaims him President of 
the Republic, from the present day till the second Sunday 
of May, 1852.” 

A movement was seen on the benches and in the tribunes, 
which were full of people. The President of the Constitu- 
ent Assembly added :— 

‘“‘According to the terms of the decree, I invite the 
citizen President of the Republic to be pleased to present 
himself at the tribune, there to make oath.” 

The representatives, who were encumbering the lobby, 
_ went up to their places and left the passage free. It was 
about four o’clock in the evening, night was falling, and 
the vast hall of the Assembly was half plunged in shadow. 
The lights descended from the ceilings, and the attendants 
had just placed the lamps upon the tribune. 

The President made a sign, and the door at the right 
opened. A man, still young, dressed.in black, having on 
his coat the badge and the great cord of the Legion of 
Honor, was then seen to enter the hall and rapidly ascend 
the tribune. Every face turned toward the man. 

A wan face, whose thin and bony angles the lamps from 
the skylight made peculiarly distinct; a nose thick and 
long ; mustaches ; a lock of hair curled on a narrow fore- 
head ; the eye small and without clearness ; the attitude 


Napoleon the Little. II 


timid and ill at ease; no resemblance to the Emperor. 
This was the citizen Charles-Louis-Napoleon-Bonaparte. 

During the kind of murmur which followed his entrance 
he remained several minutes with his right hand in his 
buttoned coat, standing, and motionless, on the tribune, 
whose front bore this date, 22d, 23d, 24th* of February ; 
and above that these three words: ‘‘ Liberty, Equality, 
Fraternity.” 

Before his election as President of the Republic, Charles- 
Louis-Napoleon-Bonaparte was a representative of the 
people. He had sat in the Assembly for several months, 
and although he rarely remained during entire sessions, he 
might often be seen sitting in the place which he had 
chosen on the higher benches of the left, in the fifth row, 
in that circle commonly called the ‘‘ mountain,” behind 
his old preceptor, the representative Vieillard. The man 
was not a new form to the Assembly, yet his entrance pro- 
duced deep emotion. For all, for his friends as for his 
enemies, it was the future which entered, a future unknown. 
In the kind of immense murmur which was formed by the 
suppressed voices of all, his name might have been heard 
accompanied by remarks the most different. His antagon- 
ists recounted his adventures; his attempts ; Strasbourg ; 
Boulonge ; the tame eagle and the piece of meat stuck in 
the little hat. His friends recalled his exile ; a good book 
on artillery ; his writings printed at Ham, which were to a 
certain degree liberal in spirit, democratic and socialistical ; 
his maturer age ; and to those which repeated his follies, 
they recalled his misfortunes. 


_ *® Days of the abdication of Louis Philippe, and the inauguration of 
the second Republic, 


12 yee Napoleon the Little. 


General Cavaignac, who, not having been named presi- 
dent, had just resigned power into the bosom of the 
Assembly, with that quiet brevity which becomes republics, 
seated in his habitual place at the head of the bench of 
ministers, to the left of the tribune, beside Marie, minister 
of justice, was assisting, silent, and with arms crossed, at 
the installation of the new man. At last silence reigned, 
and the President of the Assembly struck several blows with 
his gavel on the table. The last sound died away, and the 
President of the Assembly said :— 

**T am about to read the form of oath.” 

The moment possessed something of the religious. The 
Assembly was no longer the Assembly, it was a temple. 
What added to the immense significance of this oath was 
that it was the only one which was taken in the whole ex- 
tent of the Republic. 

February had wisely abolished the political oath, and the 
Constitution, with equal reason, had only preserved the oath 
of the President. This oath had the double characteristic 
of necessity and grandeur. It was the executive power, 
which is a subordinate power, which made oath to the legis- 
lative power, which is a superior power. It was still better 
than that. Inverting that fiction of monarchy, according to 
which it is the people who make oath to the man invested 
with power, it was the man invested with power who made 
oath to the people. 

The President, an officer and servant, swore fidelity to 
the sovereign people, bowing before the national majesty 
visible in the omnipotent Assembly. He received from the 
Assenibly the Constitution, and swore obedience to it. The 
representatives were inviolable, and he was not. We repeat 


Napoleon the Little. 13 


it : a citizen responsible before all citizens, he was the only 
man in the nation bound in this manner. On that account 
there was in the unique and supreme oath a solemnity 
which took hold of the very heart. He who writes these 
lines was seated in his place in the Assembly on the day 
on which this oath was taken. He is one of those who, 
taken in the presence of the civilized world, received that 
oath in the name of the people, and who have it yet in 
their hands. Here it is :—‘‘In the presence of God, and 
before the French people represented by the National 
Assembly, I swear to remain faithful to the Democratic 
Republic, one and indivisible, and to fulfill all the duties 
which the Constitution imposes upon me.” 

The President of the Assembly, standing, read this ma- 
jestic formula ; then, all the Assembly keeping silence and 
riveting their attention, the citizen Charles-Louis-Napoleon- 
Bonaparte, raising his right hand, said in a voice high and 
firm, ‘‘I swear it.” 

The representative Boulay (from Muerthe), since Vice- 
president of the Republic, and one who had known Charles- 
Louis-Napoleon-Bonaparte from childhood, exclaimed: 
‘* He is an honest man; he will keep his oath.” 

The President of the Assembly, always standing, replied, 
and we cite here only the words literally enregistered in the 
Moniteur, ‘‘We take God and men to witness the oath 
which has just-been taken.” 

The National Assembly took action on it, ordered that it 
should be transcribed upon the record of proceedings, in- 
serted in the A/onifeur, published and posted after the 
manner of legislative acts. 

It seemed as if everything had Besa done. They waited 


14 Napoleon the Little. 


till the citizen Charles-Louis-Napoleon-Bonaparte, thereaf- 
ter President of the Republic till the second Sunday of May, 
should descend from the tribune. Hedid not descend from 
it. He felt the noble necessity of binding himself still 
further, if it was possible, and to add somewhat to the oath 
which the Constitution exacted of him, in order to show 
them to what degree this oath was free and spontaneous on 
his part. Heasked the usual permission to speak. ‘‘ You 
have it,” said the President of the Assembly. 

The attention and silence redoubled. The citizen Louis- 
Napoleon-Bonaparte unfolded a paper and read an address. 
In it he announced and installed the ministry named by 
him, and said :— 

“‘T desire, as you do, citizen representatives, to re-estab- 
lish society again upon its foundations, reaffirm democratic 
institutions, and to search out all proper means for com- 
forting the woes of this generous and intelligent people who 
have just given me so distinguished a proof of their confi- 
dence.”* He thanked his predecessor in the executive power, 
the same who could say, later on, these beautiful words, 
**T have not fallen from power, I have descended from it,” 
and he extolled him in these terms: ‘‘ The new adminis- 
tration, in entering upon affairs, must thank that which has 
preceded it for the efforts which it has made to transmit 
power intact, and for maintaining public order.t The con- 
duct of the honorable General Cavaignac has been worthy 
of the loyalty of his character and of that sentiment of 
duty which is the first quality of the chief of a state.”{ 


* (Very good! very good !)—Moniteur, 
+ (Marks of adhesion.)}—Moniteur, 
ft (New marks of assent. )—Moniteur, 


ot tn i ies 


apaleen the Little. 15 


The Assembly applauded at these words; but what 
struck all minds, and what engraved itself deeply on all 
memories, and had an echo in all loyal consciences, was 
this entirely spontaneous declaration with which he began. 
We repeat it :— 

«The suffrages of the nation and the oath which I have 
just taken command my future conduct. My duty is 
traced. I will fulfill it asa man of honor. I will see ene- 
mies of the country in all those who would try to change 
by illegal means what France entire has established.” 
When he had finished speaking, the Constituent Assembly 
arose, and, with a single voice, sent forth this grand cry, 
‘Vive la Republique.” 

Louis-Napoleon-Bonaparte descended from the tribune, 
went straight to General Cavaignac, and offered him his 
hand. The general hesitated several moments before ac- 
cepting this clasp of the hand. All who had just heard the 
words of Louis Bonaparte, pronounced in a tone of loyalty 
so profound, blamed the general. 

The Constitution to which Louis-Napoleon-Bonaparte 
took oath on the 20th of December, 1848, ‘‘in the face of 
God and man,” contained, among other articles, these :— 

‘« ArT, 36. The representatives of the people are inviolable. 

“« Art. 37. They cannot be arrested on a criminal charge, 
save in the case of flagrant misdemeanor ; nor prosecuted 
except after the Assembly has permitted the prosecution. 

‘Art. 68. Every measure by which the President of the 
Republic dissolves the National Assembly, prorogues it, or 
places obstacles in the way of the execution of its decrees, 
is a crime of high treason. By this sole fact the President is 
suspended from his functions, the citizens are bound to 


16 Napoleon the Little. 


refuse him obedience, the executive power passes in full right 
to the National Assembly. The judges of the high court shall 
assemble immediately, on pain of forfeiture. They shall 
convoke the jury in the place that they appoint, in order to 
proceed to the trial of the President and his accomplices, 
They shall declare themselves the magistrates charged with 
fulfilling the functions of the public ministry.” 

Less than three years after this memorable day, the 2d of 
December, 1851, at break of day, one could read, on all 
the corners of the streets of Paris, the following notice :— 

‘*In the name of the French people, the President of the 
Republic decrees— . 

“ ArT. Ist. The National Assembly is dissolved. 

‘*Arr, 2d. Universal suffrage is re-established. The law 
of the 31st of May * is abrogated. 

““Arr. 3d. The French people are convoked in their 
communities. 

‘‘ArT. 4th. The state of siege is decreed in the entire 
extent of the first military division. 

“Art, 5th. The Council of State is dissolved. 

“‘Art. 6th. The minister of the interior is charged with 
the execution of the present decree. 

‘‘ Done at the palace of the Elysée, the 2d of December, 
TOg1s” 

At the same time Paris learned that fifteen of the inviola- 
ble representatives of the people had been arrested in their 
homes during the night by order of Louis-Napoleon-Bona- 
parte. 








* A law by which suffrage was restricted to those who had resided in a 
canton or precinct for three years, abrogating the old law which said six 
months, It practically disfranchised a million.—Tr. 


GC’ BEALP ir Rees lel 
COMMISSION OF THE REPRESENTATIVES. 


Tuose who received, in deposit for the people as repre- 
sentatives of the people, the oath of the zoth o December, 
1848 ; those, above all, who twice invested with the confi- 
dence of the people, saw it sworn as constituents and saw 
it violated as lggislators, had assumed at the same time with 
their commission two duties. 

The first was, on the day on which the oath should be 
violated, to arise, offer their breasts ; to calculate neither the 
number nor force of the enemy ; to cover with their bodies 
the sovereignty of the people, and to seize, in order to do 
battle with and cast down the usurper, all arms, from the 
law which they found in the code to the paving-stone that 
you pick up in the street. 

The second duty was, after having accepted the struggle 
and all its chances, to accept the proscription and all its 
misery ; to stand eternally upright before the traitor, with his 
oath in their hand; to forget their individual sufferings, 
their private griefs, their families distressed and crippled. 
their fortunes destroyed, their affections wounded, their 
hearts bleeding ; to forget themselves. To have thereafter 
but one trouble, the wound of France ; to cry justice ! never 
to allow themselves to be appeased or bent; to be impla- 
cable ; to seize the abominable crowned perjurer, if not 
with the hand of the law, at least with the pincers of the 


18 Napoleon the Little. 


truth ; to make all the letters of his oath red at the fire of 
history, and to brand them on his face. 

He who writes these lines is of those who recoiled be- 
fore nothing on the 2d of December to accomplish the first 
of these two great duties, 

In publishing this book he fulfills the second. 


CHAPT BERET: 
FORCED TO SILENCE. 


Ir is time that the human conscience should awake. 
Since the 2d of December, 1851, an ambush has succeeded 
a crime odious and repulsive, infamous and unheard of, 
if we consider the century in which it has been com- 
mitted. It triumphs and domineers ; erects itself in actual 
theory ; blooms in the face of the sun; makes laws, enacts 
decrees, takes society, religion, and the family under its 
protection ; offers its hand to the kings of Europe (who 
accept it), and says to them, ‘‘ My brother, or my cousin.” 
This crime no one disputes, not even those who profit by it 
and live on it—they say only that it was necessary ; nor 
does he who committed it dispute it—he says only that to 
him, the criminal, it has been adsolved/ 

This crime contains all crimes ; treason in the concep- 
tion, perjury in the execution, murder and assassination in 
the struggle, spoliation, swindling, and theft in the triumph. 
This crime draws after it, as integral parts of itself, the 
suppression of laws, the violation of things made inviolable 
by the Constitution, arbitrary sequestration, the confiscation 
of goods, nocturnal massacres, shots fired in secret, com- 
missions taking the place of the tribunals, ten thousand 
citizens exiled, forty thousand proscribed, sixty thousand 
families ruined and desperate! These things are petent. 
Well, this is the bitter truth. Silence is kept over this 


20 Napoleon the Little. 


crime. It is there ; one touches it ; one sees it; one passes 
on and goes to one’s affairs ; the shop opens ; the exchange 
jobs in stocks. Conscience sits down on its ballot; rubs 
its hands ; and we also desire the moment when one is 
going to consider it all natural. He who measures the 
stuff with the ell-stick does not hear that the measure 
which he has in his hand speaks to him and says, ‘‘ It is 
a false measure which governs.” He who weighs a com- 
modity does not understand that his balance lifts up its 
voice and says to him, ‘‘It is a false weight that reigns,” 
Strange order that, which has for its foundation supreme 
disorder. The denial of all right! Equilibrium founded 
on iniquity! Let us add that which nevertheless is self- 
evident, that the author of this crime is a malefactor of the 
most cynical and base species. 

At the hour which is now passing, let all those who wear 
a robe, a scarf, or a uniform—let all those who serve this 
man, know it—if they believe themselves the agents of a 
power, let them undeceive themselves. They are the com- 
rades of a pirate. : 

Since the 2d of December there have been no more 
functionaries in France ; there have been only accomplices. 
The moment has come when each man should render 
himself a good account of what he has done, and of what 
he continues to do. The gendarme who arrested those 
whom the man of Strasbourg and of Boulogne called in- 
surgents has arrested the guardians of the Constitution. 
The judge who judged the combatants of Paris or the 
provinces has put on the stool the support of the law. The 
officer who has kept the condemned in the hold of the ship 
has detained the defenders of the Republic and the State. 


Napoleon the Little. 21 


The general of Africa who imprisons at Lambessa the 
transported, who are bowed down under the sun, shivering 
with fever, digging in the burning earth ditches which shall 
be their graves—this general sequesters, tortures, and assas- 
sinates the champions of right. All guards, officers, gen- 
darmes, judges, are in full forfeiture. They have before 
them more than innocent heroes, more than victims— 
martyrs! Let them know it, then, and let them hate them- 
selves ; and as the least amends, let them break the chains. 
Let them draw the bolts, let them empty the hulks, let 
them open the gaols, since they have no longer the courage 
to seize the sword. ‘Then, conscience, arise, awake, it is 
time. If law, right, duty, reason, equity, justice do not 
suffice, let them consider the future. If remorse is silent, 
let responsibility speak. 

And let all those who, if landlords, shake hands with a 
magistrate ; if bankers, féte a general; if peasants, salute a 
gendarme. Let all those who do not withdraw from the noble- 
man’s house, where the minister is, and from the dwelling 
where the prefect resides, as from a lazar-house ; let all those 
who—simple citizens, not functionaries—go to the balls and 
banquets of Louis Bonaparte, and do not see that the black 
flag is on the Elysée—let all those know it well; this kind 
of infamy is con/agious # If they escape material complicity, 
they do not escape that which is moral. The crime of the 
2d of December soils them. The present situation, which 
seems calm to him who does not think, is violent. Let no 
one be deceived on this point. When public morality is 
eclipsed, a shadow which affrights one is created in the 


social order. All guarantees depart, all props for support 
vanish. 


22 Napoleon the Little. 


Therefore, from that time forth there is no longer any 
tribunal in France; no court, no judge who can render 
justice and pronounce a penalty in relation to anything of 
any character, against any one, in the name of anything. 
Let them bring before the assizes any malefactor whom- 
soever ; the thief will say to the judges, ‘‘ The chief of the 
State has stolen twenty-five millions of francs from the bank.’”* 
The false witness will say, ‘‘ The chief of State has made an 
oath in the face of God and man, and that oath he has 
violated.” The man guilty of arbitrary sequestration will 
say, ‘‘ The chief of State has arrested and detained, against 
all laws, the representatives of the sovereign people.” The 
swindler will say, ‘‘The chief of State has swindled his 
command, swindled power, and swindled the Tuileries.” 
The forger will say, ‘‘The chief of State has falsified a 
ballot.” The bandit of the corner of the wood will say, 
‘* The chief of State has picked the pockets of the princes 
of Orleans.” The murderer will say, ‘‘ The chief of State 
has musketed, shot with grape-shot, sabred, and cut the 
throats of passers-by in the streets ;” and all together—swind- - 
ler, forger, false witness, bandit, thief, assassin, will add, ‘‘ But 
you judges, yow want to sa/uée this man, you want to praise 
him for having perjured himself, to compliment him for 
having done a wrong, to glorify him for having swindled, 
to felicitate his having stolen, and to thank him for having 
assassinated! What do you want with us? 

Assuredly, such a state of things is grave. Togo to Ee 
over such a situation is one disgrace additional. It is 
time, let us repeat it, that this monstrous sleep of conscience 





* A witness saw it carted away. 


Napoleon the Little. 23 


a 


should end. It is not necessary that, after this startling 
scandal, the triumph of crime—a scandal more startling yet 
should be given to men—viz., the indifference of the civil- 
ized world! If that should come to pass, history would 
appear one day as an avenger.* And from this moment, as 
lions when wounded bury themselves in solitudes, the 
just man veiling his face in presence of this universal 
abasement, would take refuge in the immensity of his con- 
tempt. 





* Has it not to-day ! 


CHAPTERS 192 
MEN WILL AWAKE. 


But that will not be; men will awake. 

This book has no other object than to shake those sleep- 
ing in this sleep. 

France is zof to adhere to this povernmene even by the 
consent of lethargy. At certain moments, in certain places, 
in certain shades, to'sleep is to die. 

Let us add, that at the present moment, France, strange 
to say, and yet it is the truth, knows nothing of what passed 
on the 2d of December and since, or knows it imperfectly, 
and it is that which affords an excuse. 

Hlowever, thanks to several generous and courageous 
publications, the facts begin to “ranspire. 

This book is destined to bring some of them to light, 
and, if it please God, to place all of them in clear day. 

It is of importance that we know a little what M. Bona- 
parte is. At the present time, thanks to the suppression of 
the Zrzbune, thanks to the suppression of the press, of free 


speech, of liberty and truth (a suppression which has for 


its results to allow all liberty to M. Bonaparte, but which, 
at the same time, has the effect of nullifying all his acts 
without exception, the indescribable ballot of the 2d of 
December included) ; thanks, let us say, to this smother- 
ing of complaint and all information—no circumstance, no 


sh, 


sone 


Napoleon the Little. 25 


man, no fact, wears its own shape or carries its true name. 
The crime of M. Bonaparte is not crime, its name is 
necessity. The ambush of M. Bonaparte is not an am- 
bush, it is called the defense of order. The thefts of M. 
Bonaparte are not thefts, they are termed measures of State. 
The murders of M. Bonaparte are not murders, they are 
called public safety. The accomplices of M. Bonaparte 
are not malefactors, they are called magistrates, senators, 
and counsellors of state. The adversaries of M. Bona- 
parte are not the soldiers of law and right, they are called 
jaques,* demagogues, factionists. In the eyes of France, 
in the eyes of Europe, the 2d of December still wears a 
mask. 

This book is nothing else than a hand, which goes out 
from the shadow, which tears away the mask. 

We are going to expose this triumph of order, and paint 
this government, so vigorous, so square and strong ; this 
government having in its favor a crowd of young people 
who have more ambition than boots ; which is sustained on 
the exchange by Fould the Jew, and in the Church by 
Montalembert the Catholic; esteemed by women who 
wish to be mistresses, and by men who wish to be prefects ; 
propped up by a coalition of prostitutions ; giving fétes ; 
making cardinals; wearing a white cravat, with its fold- 
ing hat under its arm; gloved fresh-butter-colored, like 
Morney ; varnished anew, like Manpas ; fresh brushed, like 
Persigny ; rich, elegant, neat, gilded, joyous—born in a 
pool of blood! 

Yes: there will be a rewakening! Yes: men will come 





* Insurgent peasants. 
2 


26 Napoleon the Little. 


out of this stupor which, for such a people, is shame! And 
when France shall awake—when she shall open her eyes, 
and distinguish objects—when she shall see that which is 
before her and at her side, she will recoil—this France 
will—with trembling terror before this monstrous offense 
which has dared to espouse her in the darkness, and whose 
bed she has shared. 

Then the supreme hour will tell. The skeptics will 
smile and maintain their view. ‘They will say: ‘‘ They 
say, hope for nothing. This reign, according to you, is 
the shame of France. So be it. This shame is quoted at 
the Bourse—hope for nothing. You are poets and dream- 
ers 1f you hope. Look then at the Zribune, the press, 
intelligence, speech, thought, all which was liberty, has 
disappeared. Yesterday these moved, were quieted ; lived ; 
to-day they were petrified. 

“Well, one is content ; one accommodates himself to 
the petrifaction. One makes use of it ; one does business 
with it. One sees how much as usual society continues 
upon it; and plenty of honest people find things go well. 

“Why do you desire that the situation should change? 
Why do you wish that it should end? Do not delude 
yourself; this thing is solid; it is the present and the 
future ! !” 

We are in Russia. .The Neva is frozen. They build 
houses on it ; heavy carriages roll on its surface. It is no 
longer water, it is rock. The passers-by go and come on 
this marble which has been a river ; they improvise a city ; 
they trace out the streets ; they open the shops ; they sell, 
they buy, they drink ; they eat, they sleep, they light fires 
on this water. They can permit themselves anything. Fear 


 ] 


Napoleon the Little. 27 


nothing ; do what you please; laugh, dance—it is more 
solid than dry land. It actually sounds under the foot like 
granite. Long live winter! long live ice! There is ice, 
and it shall stand forever. And look at the heavens. Is 
it day? is it night? A gleam wan and pale crawls over 
the snow. One would say that the sun is dead. 

No; thou art not dead, Liberty. Ona day, and at the 
moment when they least expect it ; at the hour when they 
had most profoundly forgotten thee, thou shalt arise. O 
dazzling sight! One will see thy star-like face suddenly 
come out from the earth and shine on the horizon. On all 
this snow, this ice, this hard, white plain; on this water 
become block, thou shalt dart thy golden arrow, thy bright 
and burning ray, thy light, thy heat, thy life. And then! 
do you hear that dull sound? Do you hear that cracking 
deep and dreadful? It is the breaking of the ice! It is the 
Neva which is tearing loose! It is the river which retakes 
its course ! 

It-is the water alive, joyous, and terrible, which takes off 
the ice, which is hideous and dead, and crushes it. It 
was granite, said you; see, it splits like glass. It is the 
breaking up of the ice, I tell you. 

It is truth, which is coming again. It is progress, which 
recommences. It is humanity, which again begins its 
march, which drifts full of fragments, which draws away, 
roots out, carries off, strikes together, mingles, crushes, 
and drowns in its waves, like the poor miserable furniture 
of a ruin, not only the upstart empire of Louis Bonaparte, 
but all the establishments and all the results of ancient 
and eternal despotism. Look at all this pass by. It is 
disappearing forever. You will never see it more. See 


28 Napoleon the Little. 


that book half sunk ; it is the old code of iniquity. That 
tressel-work which has just been swallowed up is the 
throne! And this other tressel-work which is going off, it 
is—the scaffold! And for this immense engulfing, and 
for this supreme victory of life over death, what has been 
the power necessary? One of thy looks, O Sun! One of 
thy rays, O Liberty ! 


CHAPTER: V. 
BIOGRAPHY. 


Cuarves-Louis-NapoLteon-BonaparteE, born at Paris on 
the 20th of April, 1808, is the son of Hortense de Beau- 
harnais, married by the emperor to Louis Napoleon, King 
of Holland. 

In 1831, mingling with the insurrections of Italy, where 
his older brother was slain, Louis Bonaparte tried to over- 
throw the papacy. 

On the 30th of October, 1836, he endeavored to over- 
throw Louis Philippe. He made an abortive attempt at 
Strasbourg, and, having been pardoned by the king, he 
embarked for America, leaving his accomplices behind to 
be judged. On the 11th of November he wrote: ‘‘The 
king in his clemency has ordered that I should be con- 
ducted to America.” He declared himself keenly touched 
at the generosity of the king, adding: ‘‘ Most certainly we 
are all culpable toward the government in having taken 
arms against it, but Iam the most guilty.” And he closed 
thus: ‘‘I was guilty toward the government, and the goy- 
ernment has been generous toward me.”* He returned 


from America to Switzerland, had himself appointed a cap- 





* Letter read to the Court of Assizes by the attorney Parquin,. who 
after having read it, exclaimed, ‘‘ Among the numerous faults of Louis 
Napoleon, we must not count ingratitude the least,” 


208 Napoleon the Little. 


tain of artillery at Berne and burgess of Salenstein in Thur- 
govia, avoiding equally, in the midst of the diplomatic 
complications caused by his presence, to declare himself 
French as to avow himself Swiss ; and confining himself, 
in order to reassure the government, to the affirmation con- 
tained in a letter of the 2oth of August, 1838, ‘‘that he 
lived almost alone in the house where his mother died, and 
that his firm desire was to remain quiet.” On the 6th of 
August, 1840, he debarked at Boulogne, making a parody 
of the disembarkment at Cannes.* He had on the little 
hat.f He carried a gilt eagle at the end of a flag-staff, 
and a live eagle in a cage; also plenty of proclamations. 
He had sixty valets, cooks, and hostlers disguised as French 
soldiers, with uniforms bought at the temple, and with 
buttons of the 42d of the line manufactured in London. 
He threw money to the passers-by in the streets of Bou- 
logne, put his hat on the point of his sword, and cried 
with his own voice, Vive l’empereur. He shot at an officerf 
with a pistol, the bullet missing and breaking three teeth in 
a soldier's mouth, and he fled! He was taken. They 
found on him five hundred thousand frances in gold and 
bank-notes.§ The procurer-general, Frank Cassé, said to 
him, before the Court of Peers: ‘‘ You have made it a 
practice to tamper with treason, and you have distributed 
money to buy it.” ‘The peers condemned him to impris- 


* The last landing of the first emperor, 

+ Court of Peers. Outrage of the 2d of August, 1840, page 140. 
Witness : Geoffrey, a grenadier, 

+ Captain-Colonel Puygellier, who had said to him, ‘‘ You are a con- 
spirator and a traitor,” 

¢@ Court of Peers. Witness: Adam, Mayor of Boulogne. 


Napoleon the Little. 31 


onment for life. They shut him upin Ham. There his 
mind seemed to turn in on itself and ripen. He wrote and 
published some books of mark, in spite of a certain igno- 
rance of France in this century, concerning democracy and 
progress—The Extinction of Pauperism, The Analysts of the 
Question of Sugars, Napoleonic Ideas—in which he made the 
emperor a humanitarian. In a book entitled Auésforic 
fragments, he wrote: ‘‘I am a citizen before I am Bona- 
parte.” Already, in 1832, in his book on political reveries, 
he had declared himself a ‘‘ Republican.” After six years of 
captivity, he escaped from the prison at Ham, disguised as a 
mason, and took refuge in England. February arrived. He 
hailed the Republic, and came to sit as a representative of 
the people in the Constituent Assembly. He mounted the 
tribune on the 21st of September, 1848, and said: ‘‘ All my 
life shall be consecrated to the strengthening of the Re- 
public.” He published a manifesto which can be summed 
up in two lines: ‘‘ Liberty, progress, democracy, amnesty, 
abolition of decrees of proscription and banishment.” He 
was elected president by five million five hundred thousand 
votes ; swore solemnly to keep the Constitution on the zoth 
of December, 1848, and in 1851 he destroyed it. In the 
interval he had destroyed the Roman Republic, and he re- 
stored in 1849 that papacy which he desired to overthrow 
in 1831. He had, besides, taken one does not know what 
part in the obscure affair, called the lottery of the ingots 
of gold, in the weeks which preceded the coup d’état. 
This sac had become transparent, and a hand resembling 
his own had been seen in it, 

The 2d of December and the days following he seized 
the executive power, and made an attempt upon the legislative 


32 Napoleon the Litt 


power ; he arrested the representatives, drip irOp ,. <I> 
Assembly, dissolved the council of state, expeding 4€ high 
court of justice, suppressed the laws, took twheig -five mil- 
lions from the bank, gorged the army with gold, raked 
Paris with grape-shot, terrorized France. Since, he has 
proscribed eighty-four of the representatives of the people ; 
stolen from the Princes of Orleans the property of Louis 
Philippe, to whom he owed his life; decreed despotism 
in fifty-eight articles under the title of a Constitution ; 
garroted the Republic ; made the sword of France a gag in 
the mouth of liberty ; stock-jobbed in the railroads through 
brokers ; rifled the pockets of the people; regulated the 
budget by ukase; transported to Africa and Cayenne ten 
thousand Democrats ; exiled in Belgium, in Spain, in Pied- 
mont, in Switzerland, and in England forty thousand Re- 
publicans ; placed im all souls grief, and on all foreheads 
blushes. 

Louis Bonaparte thought to mount a throne. .. He does 
not perceive that he is mounting the post. 


CELE PER VT, 
PORTRAIT. 


Lourts BonaparRTE is a man of about the middle height ; 
he is cold, pale, siow, and has the air of one who is not 
entirely awake. He has published, as we have already re- 
called, a treatise on artillery, which has been well received, 
and he is thoroughly acquainted with the maneuvering of 
cannon. He rides well. He has a slight German accent. 
What he has of the buffoon about him has appeared at the 
tourney of Eglington. He has a thick mustache, covering 
up his smile, like the Duke of Alba, and a dim eye like 
Charles IX. If one should judge him disconnected from 
what he calls his ‘‘ necessary acts,” or his ‘‘great acts,” he 
is a personage vulgar, puerile, theatrical, and vain. 

The persons invited by him in the summer at St. Cloud, 
receive at the same time with the invitation the order to 
bring a morning as well as an evening toilet. He likes 
bombast, the top-knot, the tuft, embroidery, spangles, and 
shirt-pins. He has also a fondness for large words, great 
titles, things that sound, things that shine, and all the glass- 
ware of power. In his character as kinsman of the battle 
of Austerlitz, he dresses as general. 

It makes little difference to him whether he is respected. 
He contents himself with the imitation of respect. This 


man would tarnish the second plane of history ; he soils the 
2* 


34 Napoleon the Little. 


first. Europe laughed from the other continent,* as she 
looked at Hayti, when she saw this white Soulouque ap- 
pear.t There is now in Europe, evident even to strangers, 
a profound stupor in the depths of all minds, and, as it 
were, the feeling of a personal affront ; for the continent of 
Europe, whether she wish it or not, is bound up with 
France, and what abases France humiliates Europe. 

Before the 2d of December, the leaders of the right 
freely said of Louis Bonaparte, ‘‘ The man is an idiot.” 
_ They were mistaken. Assuredly his brain is muddy. It 
bas gaps, but one can decipher in it in places several cohe- 
rent thoughts, sufficiently linked together. It is a book 
with many pages torn out. Louis Bonaparte has one fixed 
idea. But a fixed idea is not idiocy. Hé knows what he 
desires, and he travels toward it, over justice, over law, 
over reason, over honesty, over humanity; but he goes 
toward it. A man who does this is not an idiot. It is one 
who belongs to another age indeed. He seems absurd and 
insane, because he is badly matched. ‘Transport him to 
the sixteenth century and to Spain, and Philip IL. will 
recognize him ; to England, and Henry VIII. will smile 
on him; to Italy, and Cesar Borgia will throw his arms 
around his neck. Or even do no more than place him 
outside of European civilization; put him, in 1817, at 
Janina, Ali Tepeleni will offer him his hand. There is 
something of the middle ages and the lower empire} about 
him. What he does has an altogether pure resemblance to 


* That is, Europe which had emigrated to America, 

+ Soulouque was a negro emperor of Hayti, who had treated that island 
as Louis Napoleon has treated France. 

{ The Roman empire, from the fall of the Empire of the West to the 
aking of Constantinople, 


Napoleon the Little. 3a 


Michel Ducas, to Romain Diogéne, to Nicephorus Bo- 
toniate, to the eunuch Narses, to the vandal Stilicon, to 
Mahomet II., to Alexander VI., to Ezzelin of Padua,* 
and, above all, it most purely resembles himself—only he 
seems to forget or he ignores that in the times in which we 
live his actions will have to cross those great rivers of hu- 
man morality cleared by our three centuries of literature 
and by the French Revolution, and that in the midst of 
these his actions will take their true shape, and will appear 
what they are—hideous. 

His partisans—he has some—freely place him on a par 
with his uncle, the first Bonaparte. They say, one did the 
18th of Brumaire, the other the 2d of December. They 
are both ambitious: the first Bonaparte desired to re-es- 
tablish the Empire of the West, make Europe a vassal, rule 
the continent with his power, and dazzle it with his great- 
ness ; to take an arm-chair, and give stools to kings, and 
make history say, ‘‘ Nimrod, Cyrus, Alexander, Hannibal, 
Cesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon ;” in fact, to be a master. 
of the world. He was one. That is why he made the 18th 
Brumaire.¢ This Napoleon wants to have horses and girls, 
to be called ‘* My lord,” and to enjoy good living. That 
is why he made the 2d of December. 

These are two ambitious men ; the comparison is just. 

Let us add, that like the first, this one also wishes to be 
emperor ;{ but what calms a little these comparisons is, that 





* Various scoundrels well known in history, 

+ Coup d’état of the First Napoleon, 

t The Constitution which declared Louis Bonaparte emperor bears the 
date of December 25th, 1852, and consequently had not been enacted when 
this book was first published. He was then dictator, elected for ten years. 


6 Napoleon the Little. 


w& 


there is perhaps a little difference between conquering an 
empire and cheating one’s way into one. 

Be that as it may ; what is certain, and what nothing can 
veil, not even that dazzling curtain of glory and misforture 
on which one reads Arcold Lodi, the Pyramids, Elau, 
Friedland, Saint Helena ; what is certain, for our part, we 
affirm, is that the 18th of Brumaire* is a crime, whose stain 
on the memory of Napoleon the 2d of December has en- 
larged. 

M. Louis Bonaparte allows himself freely to be suspected 
of socialism. He thinks that it affords a sort of waste field, 
susceptible of being cultivated by ambition. As we have 
said, he passed his time, during his imprisonment, in 
creating for himself a quasi reputation as a Democrat. 

One fact describes him. When he published his book 
on the Extinction of Pauperism, during his confinement 
at Ham, a book apparently having for its sole and exclu- 
sive object to probe the wound of the miseries of the 
"people and to point out methods of relief, he sent the 
work to one of his friends, with this note, which has passed 
under our eyes: ‘‘Read this work on pauperism, and tell 
me if you think that it is calculated 40 do me good.” 

The great talent of M. Louis Bonaparte is silence. 

Before the 2d of December he had a council of minis- 
ters, which, as it was responsible, imagined itself to be 
something. ‘The president presided. He never, or almost 
never, took part in the discussions ; while Messrs. Odilon, 
Barrol, Passy, Tocqueville, Dufaure, or Faucher were speak- 
ing, he was constructing, with profound interest, prosti- 
tutes out of paper, or designing boon companions on the © 


* Day of Napoleon the Great’s coup d’état. 


Napoleon the Little. a7 


backs of the documents. To make death, that is his art. He 
' remains mute and motionless, looking in the other direc- 

tion from that in which his purpose lies, until the hour 

arrives ; then he turns his head and descends on his prey. 

His policy appears to you, abruptly, at an unexpected 
the pistol or the fist ‘‘w¢ fur.” Till then, the 
least motion that is possible. 


turning ; 

At one moment, in the three years which have just flown 
by, one sees him abreast of Changarnier,* who is also, on 
fis side, meditating an enterprise. ‘‘/éan/ obscurt,” as 
Virgil says. France was observing these two men with con- 
siderable anxiety. What is there between them? Is one of 
them thinking of Cromwell and the other pondering Monk? 

People were questioning themselves and watching them. 
About both there was the same mysterious manner, the 
same tactics of motionlessness. Bonaparte did not say a 
word, Changarnier did not make a gesture. One did not 
stir, the other did not breathe ; both seemed to tilt at which 
could be the most a statue. 

As for this silence, however, Louis Bonaparte broke it 
sometimes ; then he did not speak, he lied. This man 
lies as other men breathe. He announces an honorable 
intention, take care ; he affirms something, suspect him ; he 
makes oath, tremble. 

Machiavelli made some disciples; Louis Bonaparte is 
“one of them. 

To announce an enormity at which the world exclaims ; 
to disown it with indignation ; to swear by the Great God ; 
to declare himself a man of honor, and then—at the 
moment when one has reassured himself, and when one is 





* Former candidate for the presidency, 


38 Napoleon the Little. 


laughing at the possibility of the enormity in question—to 
do it. This he has done to accomplish the coup d état ; 
this, for the decrees of proscription ; this, for the robbery of 
the Orleans princes; this he will do for the invasion of / 
Belgium or Switzerland, and for the rest. This is the way 
in which he proceeds. Think of what you will, it serves 
his purposes ; he thinks well of it, it is his affair. He will 
have to clear it up with history. One is of his intimate 
circle ; he will allow you to catch a glimpse of a project 
which seems not immoral; one does not look at it so 
closely ; but it seems senseless and dangerous to himself, 
One raises objections ; he listens, does not answer ; yields 
sometimes for two or three days, then he takes up his plan 
again and does as he pleases. There is often at his table, 
in his cabinet at the Elysée, a drawer, half open ; he draws 
from it a paper, reads it toa minister. It is a decree. The 
minister approves or opposes. If he opposes, Louis Bona- 
parte throws the paper back into the drawer, where there is 
a good deal more waste paper, dreams of men who are all- 
powerful, shuts the drawer, takes the key, and goes out 
without saying a word. The minister bows and retires, 
charmed with his deference. The next morning the decree 
is in the A/oniteur, sometimes with the signature of the 
minister. ‘Thanks to this style of doing things, he has 
always at his service the unexpected—a great force ; and 
not meeting in himself any interior obstacle in that which 
other men call conscience, he pushes his purpose, it makes 
little difference over what, and he attains his object. 

He recoils sometimes, not before the moral, but the 
material effect of his acts. The decree for the expulsion of 
eighty-four representatives, published on the gth of January 


Napoleon the Little. 39 


in the Moniteur, shocked public sentiment. Well as France 
was bound, one felt the start. One was still very near the 
2d of December. Every excitement may have its danger. 
Louis Bonaparte understood it. The next day, the roth, 
a second decree of exile was to appear, containing eight 
hundred names. Louis Bonaparte had the proof-sheet of 
the Afoni/eur brought to him. The list filled fourteen col- 
umns of the official journal. He crushed the proof, threw 
it into the fire, and the decree did not appear. The pro- 
scription continued without a decree ! 

In these enterprises he wants assistants and fellow- 
laborers. He needs that which he calls himself ‘‘ men.” 
Diogenes looked for them, holding a lantern ; he, however, 
looks for them, holding a bank-note. Certain aspects of 
human nature each produce one entire species of person- 
ages, of whom that aspect is the natural center, and who 
group themselves necessarily around it, according to that 
mysterious law of gravitation which governs the moral being 
not less than the material atom. To undertake the 2d of 
December, to execute it, and to complete it, he needed 
men. He hadthem. To-day he is surrounded with them. 
These men form his court and retinue. He mingles their 
radiation with his. At certain epochs of his history there 
are galaxies of great men, at others there are galaxies of 
vagabonds. However, not to confound this epoch, the 
minute of Louis Bonaparte with the nineteenth century, 
the poisonous toad-stool shoots up at the foot of the oak ; 
but it is not the oak. 

M. Louis Bonaparte has succeeded. He has hereafter 
on his side, money, the exchange, the bank, the bourse, 
the counting-house, the strong-box, and all those men who 


40 Napoleon the Little. 


pass so easily from one boundary to the other, when there 
is nothing to stride over but shame. He has made a dupe 
of M. Changarnier, a mouthful of M. Thiers, an accom- 
plice of M. de Montalembert, of power a den, of the 
budget his farm. They are engraving at the mint a medal 
called the medal of the 2d of December, in honor of the 
manner in which he keeps his oaths. The frigate ‘‘Con- 
stitution” has changed her name. She is called the 
‘“Elysée.”** He can, whenever he may desire it, have 
himself anointed by M. Sibour, and exchange the couch 
of the Elysée for the bed of the Tuileries. In the mean 
while, for seven months, he has been making great display. 
He has harangued, triumphed, presided at banquets, given 
balls, danced, reigned, paraded, and strutted. He has 
bloomed in his ugliness at an opera-box. He has had 
himself called prince-president; he has _ distributed 
flags to the army, and crosses of the Legion of Honor to 
the commissaries of police. And when the question of 
choosing a symbol was agitated, he stood in the background 
and took the eagle ; the modesty of the sparrow-hawk. 


———al 


* Name of his palace, 





CHAPTERUVAl: 
TO MAKE A SEQUEL TO THE PANEGYRICS. 


He has succeeded. Consequently apotheosis does not 
fail him. Panegyrists! he has more of them than Trajan. 

One thing, however, strikes me; it is that, in all the 
qualities that they recognize in him since the 2d of Decem- 
ber, in all the eulogiums which they address to him, there 
is not one word which goes beyond these: cleverness, 
composure, audacity, address ; enterprises admirably pre- 
pared and conducted ; times well chosen ; secrets well kept ; 
measures well taken; false keys well made—all these are 
there. When these things are said, all is said, except a few 
phrases on clemency. And yet, did they not praise the mag- 
nanimity of Mandrin, who sometimes did not take all the 
money ; and of Jean |’Ecorcheur, who sometimes did not 
kill all the travelers? When it endowed M. Bonaparte with 
twelve millions, plus four millions, for the maintaining of 
chateaux, the Senate endowed by M. Bonaparte with a 
million, felicitates M. Bonaparte on having ‘‘saved society,” 
very much as a personage in a comedy felicitates another on 
having looked out for the cash. 

As for me, I have still to find in the adulations which 
his most ardent apologists make toward M. Bonaparte, 
one commendation which would not apply equally well to 
Cartouche and Poulailler* after a good stroke at their trade; 
and I blush sometimes for the French language and the 


* Brigands, 


42 Napoleon the Little. 


name of Napoleon, on account of the terms—truly a little 
crude, too little veiled, and too appropriate to the facts 
—in which the magistracy and the clergy felicitate this man 
for having stolen power by disobeying the Constitution, and 
for having evaded his oath by working in the dark. 

After all the infringements and all the thefts of which the 
success of his policy has been composed were accom- 
plished, he took back his true name. Everybody then 
recognized that this man was a lord. It was M. Fortoul, 
let us say it to his honor, that perceived it first.* When 
one measures the man and finds him so little, and then 
measures the success and finds it so great, it is impossible 
not to feel surprise; one asks himself, how has he done 
it; one analyzes the adventure and the adventurer, and 
laying out of question the influence which he derives from 
his name, and certain external facts by which he aided 
himself in climbing the ladder, one only finds at the 
bottom of the man and his deeds two things—cunning and 
money. 

Cunning. We have already characterized this great 
phase in the character of Louis Bonaparte, but it is useful 
to dwell upon it. 

The 27th of November, 1848, he said to his fellow- 
citizens in his manifesto :— 

“I feel myself bound to make you acquainted with my 
feelings and my principles. There is no necessity for any 
equivocation between you and me. Lam not an ambitious man. 
Educated in free countries, at the school of misfortune, 7 
will remain always faithful to the duties which your suffrages 





* The first report addressed to M. Bonaparte, or in which M. Bona- 
parte is spoken of as Monscigneur, is signed Fortoul, 


Napoleon the Little. 43 


2) 


and the wishes of the Assembly shall lay upon me. J will 
pledge my honor to leave fo my successor, at the end of four 
years, power strengthened, liberty intact, and real progress 
accomplished.” 

On the 31st of December, 1849, in his first message to 
the Assembly, he wrote :—‘‘I wish to be worthy of the 
confidence of the nation, and maintain the Constitution to 
which I have sworn.” The 12th of November, 1850, in 
his second annual message to the Assembly, he said :—‘‘If 
the Constitution includes errors and dangers, you are all 
free to expunge them in the eyes of the people. I only, 
bound by my oath, J must confine myself within the strict 
limits which that Constitution has traced.” 

On the 4th of September of the same year, he said, at 
Caen :—‘‘Since prosperity seems to be receiving new life 
everywhere, he would be exceedingly guilty who would try 
to arrest its flight by “te changing of the situation of things as 
they exist to-day.”” Sometime before the 22d of July, 1849, 
at the time of the inauguration of the St. Quentin Railroad, 
he had gone to Ham. He smote his breast at the recol- 
lections of Boulogne, and pronounced these solemn words : 
—¥‘‘Since, to-day having been elected by entire France, I 
have become the legitimate chief of this great nation, I 
cannot be proud of a captivity which had for its cause an 
assault upon a regular government. When one has seen how 
much evil the most just revolutions cause, one can scarcely 
comprehend the audacity of one’s being willing to assume 
the responsibility of a change. I do not complain, then, 
that I expiated here, by an imprisonment of six years, my 
temerity against the laws of my country; and it is with 
pleasure that, in these very scenes where I suffered, I pro- 


44 Napoleon the Little. 


pose to you a toast in honor of men who are determined 
in spite of their convictions to respect the institutions of 
their country.” All the while that he was saying that, he 
was cherishing, at the bottom of his heart, this thought, 
written by him in this very prison at Ham:—‘‘ Rarely do 
great enterprises succeed at the first attempt.” And after 
his own fashion he has proved it. Toward the middle of 
November, 1851, the representative F., an elyséan,* was 
dining with M. Bonaparte. 

‘‘What do they say in Paris and at the Assembly ?” asked 
the President of the representative. 

“Eh: prince!” 

“Well?” 

‘“They are always talking. 

**Of what?” 

(Of thecouprd cath 

‘*And does the Assembly believe in it ?” 

eC little, prince.” 

**« And you ?” 

Polvevmot-atall.” 

Louis Bonaparte seized both M. F 
to him with emotion : 


” 





’s hands, and said 


‘‘T thank you, Monsieur F., you at least do not believe 
me a rascal.”’ 

This took place fifteen days before the zd of December. 
At this period, and at this very moment, according to the 


avowal of the accomplice Maupas, they were preparing 
Mazas. t 





* 7, e,,a frequenter of the palace. 


+ A prison in Paris where criminals awaited trial. The representatives 
and others were imprisoned there. 


Napoleon the Little. 45 


Money is the other power of M. Bonaparte. Let us 
speak of the facts proved legally in the proceedings at 
Strasbourg and Boulogne. At Strasbourg, on the 3oth of 
October, 1836, Colonel Vaudrey, the accomplice of M. 
Bonaparte, charged the quarter-masters of the fourth 
regiment of artillery to ‘‘divide among the cannoneers of 
each battery two pieces of gold.” 

On the 5th of August, 1840, in the packet-boat, “ City 
of Edinburgh,” chartered by him at sea, M. Bonaparte 
called around him the sixty poor devils, his servants, whom 
he had cheated into believing that he was going to Ham- 
burg on an excursion of pleasure, and harangued them 
from the top of one of his carriages fastened on deck ; he 
declared to them his project ; threw down to them their dis- 
guises, which were uniforms of soldiers, and gave them one 
hundred francs a-head. Then he made them drink. A 
little drunkenness does not hurt great enterprises. ‘‘I saw,”’ 
said the witness Hobbs,* bar-keeper, before the Court 
of Peers, ‘‘I saw in the room a good deal of money. 
The passengers seemed to me to be reading printed papers. 
The passengers passed the night eating and drinking.” 
After the bar-keeper, hear the captain. 

The Judge asked Captain Crow: ‘‘ Did you see the 
passengers drink ?” 

Crow: ‘‘With excess. I never saw anything like it.” 

They disembark. They light upon the custom-house 
post of Wimereux. M. Louis Bonaparte gives the lead 


* Court of Peers, Depositions of witnesses, p. 94. 
+ Court of Peers, Depositions of witnesses, p. 78. See also, pp. 84 
and 88 to 94. 


46 Napoleon the Little. 


by offering the lieutenant of customs a pension of twelve 
hundred francs. 

The Judge: ‘‘ Did you not offer to the commandant of 
the port a sum of money if he would march with you?” 

The Prince: ‘‘I offered it to him, but he refused it.”* 

They arrive at Boulogne; his aides-de-camp (he had 
some at the time) carried suspended around their necks 
rouleaux of white iron full of gold pieces. 

Others followed with bags of money in their hands. +t 
They threw the money to the fishermen and peasants, in- 


“*It is enough, 


2 


viting them to cry: ‘‘ Vive Pempereur.’ 
for three hundred bawlers,” said one of the conspirators. 
Louis Bonaparte accosted the 42d, which were in barracks 
at Boulogne. Hesaid to the voltigeur, George Koehly=“ = 
am Napoleon ; you will have promotions and decorations.” 
He said to the voltigeur, Antoine Gendre: ‘‘I am the 
son of Napoleon ; let us go to the Hétel du Nord and 
order a dinner for ourselves.” He said to the voltigeur, 
Jean Meyer: ‘‘ You will be well paid.”§ He said to the 
voltigeur, Joseph Meny: ‘‘ You will come to Paris; you 
will be well paid.” An officer beside him held his hat in 
his hand, full of five-franc pieces, which they distributed to 
the curious, saying, cry ‘‘ Vive Zempereur.”’|| The grenadier 
Geoffroy, in his deposition, characterizes in these terms the 
attempt made on his mess by an officer and a sergeant in 





* Court of Peers. Cross-questioning of those implicated, p. 15. 

+ Court of Peers. Depositions of the witnesses, p, 105, 185, etc. 

{ The President: ‘‘ The children who cried, were they not the three 
hundred bawlers at Strasbourg whom you asked for in a letter ?” 

@ Court of Peers. Depositions of witnesses, p. 143. 

|| Court of Peers, Depositions of witnesses, Witness: Febivre Voltigeur, 
p. 142, 


Napoleon the Little. 47 


the plot: ‘‘The sergeant carried a bottle, and the officer 
had a saber in his hand.” These two last lines describe the 
zd of December. Let us go on. “The next day, the 
17th of June, the commandant Mésonan, who I thought 
had gone, entered my office, announced, as always, by my 
aide-de-camp. I said to him: ‘Commandant, I thought 
you had gone.’ ‘No, general, I have not gone; I have a 
letter to deliver to you.’ ‘A letter, and from whom ?’ ‘ Read, 
general.’ I bade him sit down; I took the letter; but the 
moment I opened it I perceived that the direction ran: 
to M. Commandant Mésonan. I said to him : ‘ But, my dear 
commandant, it is for you, it is not for me.’ ‘Read it, gen- 
eral.’ I opened the letter and read :— 

** “My dear Commandant, —There is the greatest necessity 
that you should see the general in question immediately. 
You know that he isa man of action, and one on whom 
one can count. You know also that he isa man whom [ 
have marked to be one day a marshal of France. Vou will 
offer him one hundred thousand francs in my name, and you 
will ask him at the office of what banker or notary he wishes 
that I shall leave three hundred thousand francs counted out 
to him in case he loses his command.’ I stopped, indig- 
nation overcoming me. _ I turned the leaf and I saw that 
the letter was signed Zouzs Napoleon, I handed the letter 
back to the commandant, telling him that it was a ridic- 
ulous and hopeless game.” 

Who speaks thus? General Magnan. Where? In open 
court, the Court of Peers. Before whom? Who is the 
man seated on the stool? the man that Magnan covers 
with ridicule, the man toward whom Magnan turns his in- 
dignant face? Louis Bonaparte ! 


48 Napoleon the Litile. 


Money, and together with it drunkenness ; that was his 
plan of action in his three enterprises: at Strasbourg, at 
Boulogne, and at Paris ; two failures, one success. 

Magnan, who refused at Boulogne, sold himself at 
Paris. If Louis Bonaparte had been conquered on the 2d 
of December, they would have found the twenty-five mil- 
lions belonging to the Bank at the Elysée, just as they 
found on his person at Boulogne the five hundred thou- 
sand francs belonging to London. 

There is, then, in France—it is necessary to come to 
plain statements on these matters—there is in France, in 
this land of the sword, of knights ; in this land of Hoche, 
of Drouot, and of Bayard—there has been a day when 
one man, surrounded by five or six Greek* politicians, ex- 
perts at ambushes, and jockeys of coups d’état, leaning on 
his elbows in a gilded office, with his feet on the andirons 
and his cigar in his mouth, has made out a tariff of mili- 
tary honor, has weighed it in a scale like provisions, as a 
thing to be bought and sold, and valued the general at a 
million and the soldier at a louis, and has said of the con- 
science of the French army : it is worth so much, 

And this man is the nephew of the Emperor. Neverthe- 
less, this nephew is not proud. He knows how to adapt 
himself to the necessities of his adventures. He takes 
easily and without rebellion any turn of destiny whatsoever. 
Put him in London, and let it be his interest to please the 
English Government ; he will not hesitate, and with the very 
hand with which he desires to seize the scepter of Charle- 
magne he will grasp the club of the policeman. 


* Filled with Greek trickery, 


Napoleon the Little. 49 


_ If I were not Napoleon I would like to be Vidocq. And 
now thought is arrested. And this is the man by whom 
France is governed! What do I say, governed? Owned 
as if by sovereign authority ! And every day and every morn- 
ing, by his decrees, by his messages, by his harangues, by 
all the unheard-of follies that he displays in the Monzteur, 
this emigrant, who does not know France, gives lessons to her, 
and this scoundrel tells France that he has saved her! And 
from whom? From herself! Before him Providence has 
only made blunders. The good God has waited for him 
to put all things in order. At last he hascome! For thirty 
years there have been all sorts of pernicious things in France— 
that uproar, that tribune; that hubbub, the press; that in- 
solent thing, thought; this crying abuse, liberty. But he 
has come ; and he has put in the place of the tribune, the 
Senate; in the place of the press, the censorship; in the place 
of thought, platitude; and in the place of liberty, the 
saber ; and by the saber, the censorship, by folly, and by the 
Senate, France is saved! Saved! Bravo! And from whom? 
I repeat it, from herself; for what was France, if you please? 
She was a tribe of pillagers, thieves, assassins, and dema- 
_ gogues. Ithas been necessary to bind her, this mad woman, 
this France; and it is M. Bonaparte—Louis—who has put the 
manacles on her. Now she is in a dungeon; on bread and 
water; punished, humiliated ; tied fast under good guard ; 
be quiet ; M. Bonaparte, policeman at the Elysée, answers 
to Europe; he has done his duty by her; this miserable 
France will have the strait-jacket the moment she stirs. Ah |! 
what is this sight? what is this dream, this nightmare? On 
one side a nation, the first of nations, and on the other a 
man,the last of men. Andsee! there is what this man does 
3 


5o Napoleon the Little. 


to this nation, What? He tramples her under his feet; he 
laughs in her face ; he mocks her ; he defies her ; he forbids 
her; he insults her; he scoffs at her. What? He says there 
is only I. What? In this land of France, where one could 
not slap a man’s face, one can slap the people’s face. What 
an abominable shame! Every time that M. Bonaparte spits, 
all faces must be wiped. And it is possible that this can last ; 
and you tell me that it witt last! No! no! no! by all the 
blood which we all have in our veins, no! it shall not last ! 
Ah! if it should last, it would be, in fact, as if there were no 
God in heaven, or as if there were no France on earth | 


BOOK SECOND.—THE GOVERNMENT. 





CHAPTER .I. 
THE CONSTITUTION, 


Rott of .drums ; clowns, attention ! ' 

‘The President of the Republic, considering that all 
laws restrictive of the liberty of the press have been repealed ; 
that all laws against colportage have been abolished ; that 
the right of assemblage has been fully re-established ; that 
all unconstitutional laws and all measures resorting to mar- 
tial law have been suppressed ; every citizen having it in 
his power to say what he pleases through all the channels 
of publication—in the journals, by posting, by electoral 
assemblage ; seeing that all engagements which have been 
assumed, especially the oath of the 20th December, 1848, 
have been scrupulously kept ; all facts having been exam- 
ined ; all questions asked and cleared up ; all candidateships 
having been publicly debated, so that no one can allege 
that the least violence has been done against the least citi- 
zen ; that is to say, in one word, in liberty the most com- 
plete ; the sovereign people, interrogated by the following 
question :—Do the French people intend to place them- 
selves, bound hand and foot, in the discretionary power of 
M. Louis Bonaparte? have answered YES, by seven million 
five hundred thousand suffrages—(interruption of the au- 


52 Napoleon the Little. 


thor; we shall speak again of these seven million five 
hundred thousand suffrages)—promulges the Constitution, 
whose tenor is as follows :— : 

_ “Article ftrs.—The Constitution recognizes, confirms, 
and guarantees the great principles proclaimed in 1789, and 
which are the foundation -of the public rights of French- 
men. 

«* Articles second and others.—The tribune and the press, 
which fetter the march of progress, are replaced by the police 
and the censorship, and by the secret discussions of the 
Senate, Corps Legislatif, and Council of State. 

«* Article last. —That thing which they call human intel- 
ligence is suppressed. 

‘‘Done at the palace of the Tuileries, January the 14th, 
1852. 

“Louis NAPOLEON. 

‘¢ Examined, and sealed with the great seal, by the keeper 
of the seals, minister of justice. 

‘*E. Rovner.” 

M. Bonaparte has been evidently and happily inspired with 
this Constitution, which boldly proclaims and affirms the 
Revolution of 178g in its principles and consequences, and 
which only abolishes liberty, by an old post-bill of a coun- 
try theater, which it is @ propos to recall :— 


TO-DAY: 
GRAND REPRESENTATION OF 
THE WHITE LADY: 


OPERA IN THREE ACTS. 


Note. —The music which embarrassed the ease of the 
action will be replaced by a lively and piquant dialogue. 


One BU ee 


tl) tele 


lt a ee BE T.. 


SL es es ele 


CHAPT Rik 


THE SENATE, 


Tue lively and piquant dialogue is between the Council 
of State, the Corps Legislatif, and the Senate. There is, then, 
a Senate? Without doubt. This ‘‘ great body,” this ‘‘bal- 
ancing power,”* this ‘‘supreme moderator,” is even the 
principal splendor of the Constitution. Let us dwell on 
it. A Senate ; of what Senate do you speak? Is it of the 
Senate which deliberated on the sauce with which the Em- 
peror would eat his turbot? Is it of the Senate of which 
Napoleon said, on the 5th of April, 1814 : ‘‘A sign was an 
order to the Senate ; it always did more than one asked of 
it?” Is it of the Senate of which Napoleon said, in 1805: 
“The cowards were afraid to displease me?”+ Is it of the 
Senate which almost extorted the same cry from Tiberius : 
‘*Ah the wretches ! more slaves than one can wish?” Isit of 

~ the Senate which made Charles the Twelfth say, ‘‘Send my 
boot to Stockholm.” ‘‘ For what, sire ?” asked the minister, 
‘“To preside at the sessions of the Senate?” No, we are not 
joking, they are eighty this year ; next year they will be one 
hundred and fifty. They have all to themselves, and in full 
possession, fourteen articles of the Constitution, from the 
nineteenth to the thirty-third ; they are ‘‘ guardians of the 





* Appeal to the People. 
{ Thibaudeau, Hist. du Consulat et de P Empire, 


54 Napoleon the Little.. 


” 


public liberties;” their functions are gratuitous (article 
twenty-second); in consequence they have from fifteen 
to thirty thousand francs a year; they have the monopoly 
of taking care of their own interests and this property ; ‘‘ they 
do not oppose themselves to the promulgation of laws ;” 
they are all illustrations. ‘This is not a would-be Senate, 
like that of the other Napoleon; this is a serious Senate. 
The marshals belong to it, the cardinals belong to it, M. 
Leboeuf belongs to it. ‘‘ What are you doing in this country ?” 
one asks of the Senate. ‘‘ We are charged with the duty of 
guarding the public liberties.” ‘‘ What are you doing in this 
city?” asks Jack Pudding of Harlequin? ‘‘I am ordered 
to comb the bronze horse,””* 

One knows what the esprit de corps is. That spirit will 
impel the Senate to augment its power by all instrumen- 
talities. ** It will destroy the Corps Legislatif, and if the 
occasion presents, it will tamper with the Bourbons.” 
Who said that?” The first Consul. Where? At the 
Tuileries, in April, 1804. ‘‘ Without title, without power, 
and in violation of ali principles, it has betrayed the 
country and completed its ruin; it has been the plaything 
of high intriguers. Ido not know a body which ought 
to be recorded in history with more ignominy than the 
Senate.” Who said that? The Emperor. Where? At 
St. Helena. There is, then, a Senate in the ‘‘ Constitution 
of the 14th of January;” but frankly, it isa fault. One is 

a 

* “All the illustrations of the country,” Louis Bonaparte’s appeal to 
the people, 2d of December, 1857. : 

“The Senate has been nullified in France; one does not like to see peo- 


ple well paid for doing nothing.” The words of Napoleon, memorial of 
St. Helena, Fi 


Napoleon the Little. 55 


accustomed, now that the care of the public health has 
made such progress, to see the public roads better kept than 
that. Since the senate of the empire, we did not believe 


that people would deposit any more senates along consti- 
tutions. 


CRAP AER Pre 
THE COUNCIL OF STATE AND THE CORPS LEGISLATIF, 


THERE is also the Council of State and the Corps Legis- 
latif. The Council of State, cheerful, paid, chub-faced, rosy, 
fat, fresh ; the eye quick, the ear red, the voice high, with 
its sword at its side, with stomach, embroidered in gold ; 
the Corps Legislatif, pale, gaunt, sad, embroidered in 
silver. The Council of State goes, comes, enters; goes 
out, comes back, rules, disposes, decides, cuts off; sees 
Louis Napoleon face to face. The Corps Legislatif 
walks on tip-toe, turns its hat around in its hands, puts 
its finger on its lips, smiles humbly, sits in the corner of 
its chair, does not speak unless it is asked a question ; its 
words being naturally obscene, there is an excuse given to 
the journals for not making the least allusion to them. The 
Corps Legislatif votes the laws and the taxes (article 39), and 
when believing itself in need of instruction—some details, 
some figures, some explanation—it humbly presents itself at 
the door of the ministries to speak to the ministers. The at- 
tendant waits upon it in the ante-chamber, and bursting out 
laughing, gives it a blow over the nose. Such are the rights 
of the Corps Legislatif. Let us grant that this melancholy 
situation commenced, in June, 1853, to draw several sighs 
from certain elegiac individuals who took part in the 
affair. ‘The report of the commission of the budget will 
remain in the memory of men as one of the most 
heart-rending chef-dauvres of the plaintive kind. Let 


Napoleon the Little. Sy 


us repeat its sweet words. ‘‘ Formerly, you know, neces- 


sary communications in some cases were held directly 


** between the commissioners and the ministers. It was to 
** the latter that one addressed himself to obtain the docu- 


ments indispensable to the scrutiny of affairs. They 
came themselves, with the chief of their different ser- 
vices, to give verbal explanations sufficiently often to 
prevent all further discussion; and the resolutions 
which the commission of the budget stopped, after 
having heard them, were submitted directly to the 
Chamber. ‘To-day we cannot have conference with the 
govethment, except through the Council of State, 
which, in its secrets and organ of its thought, has the 
sole right to transmit documents to the Corps Legis- 
latif, which the latter in its turn is forced to send back 
by the hands of the ministers. In a word, for written 
reports, as for verbal communications, the commis- 
sioners of the government* replace the ministers, with 
whom they ought previously to have an understanding. 
As to the modifications which the commission may wish 
to propose, whether in consequence of the adoption of 
amendments presented by the deputies, or following 
their own examination of the budget, they ought, before 
you are called upon to deliberate on them, to be sent 
back to the Council of State, and there to be discussed. 
There (it is impossible not to call attention to it) they, 
that is, the reports, etc., have no interpreters, no official 
defenders. This mode of procedure seems to be derived 
from the Constitution itself, and if we speak of it, it is 


**“ solely to show you that it is certain to cause delays in 





* That is, the Council of State, 


58 Napoleon the Little. 


‘* the accomplishment of the task of the commission of 
‘* the budget.””* 

One cannot be more tender in reproach. It is impos- 
sible to receive with more chastity and grace what M. Bona- 
parte calls, in his autocratic style, ‘‘ guarantees of calm,” ¢ 
and what Moliére, in his liberty as a great writer, calls 
{CRIES A Sy ies ee 

There is, then, in the shop in which laws and budgets 
are manufactured, a master of the house, the Council of 
State, and a servant, the Corps Legislatif. According to the 
terms of the Constitution, who is it that names the master 
of the house? M. Bonaparte. Who is it that names the 
servant? The nation. ‘That is well. 





* Report of the Commission of the Budget from the Corps Legislatif. 
+ Preamble of the Constitution, 
¢~ Crument, See the Cheat of Scapin. 


CHAP TAG Ry bV; 


THE FINANCES. 


Ler us note that in the shadow of these ‘‘ wise” institu- 
tions, and, thanks to the coup d’état, which, as one knows, 
has re-established order, the finances, security, and public 
prosperity—the budget, according to the avowal of M. 
Gouin—closes with a deficit of a hundred and twenty-three 
millions, 

As to commercial movements since the coup d’état, as to 
the prosperity of interests, as to the renewal of business, it 
is sufficient, in order to appreciate them, to abandon words 
and take to figures. 

Make figures of it. Here is one which is official and 
decisive. The discounts of the Bank of France only pro- 
duced, during the first half-year of 1852, 589,502 francs 
62 centimes, for the central cash office ; and the profits of the 
branch offices have only reached 651,108 francs 7 centimes. 
The bank itself accords with this in its semi-annual 
statement. 

Nevertheless, M. Bonaparte does not restrain himself 
within the bounds of the taxes. Some fine morning he 
will awake, yawn, rub his eyes, take a pen, and decree— 
What? The budget! Achmet III. once wished to levy 
taxes at his own fancy. ‘‘ Invincible lord,” said his vizier, 
““thy subjects cannot be taxed beyond the limits prescribed 
by the law and the prophet.” 

This same M. Bonaparte, while he was at Ham, wrote :— 
“Ifthe sums levied every year upon the masses are employed 


+ 


60 Napoleon the Little. 


in modes that are unproductive, as for instance, 7 creating 
useless places, raising barren monuments, in maintaining in the 
midst of a profound peace an army more expensive than that 
which conquered at Austerhiz, the tax becomes a crushing 
weight, it drains the country, it takes everything and gives 
nothing.” <A propos of this word, budget, one observation 
occurs tous. To-day, in 1852, the bishops and councilors 


” 


of the Court of Appeals have fifty francs a-day ; the arch- 
bishops, the councilors of state, the chief presidents,* and 
the procurors-general have each sixty-nine francs per day-; 
the senators, the prefects, and the division-generals receive 
eighty-three francs a-day ; the presidents of the sections f 
of the Council of State have two hundred and twenty-two 
francs a-day ; the ministers two hundred and fifty-two francs 
a-day; my lord, the Prince- President, comprising in 
his allowance the sum necessary to maintain the royal 
chateaux, touches daily forty-four thousand four hundred 
and forty-four francs forty-four centimes. They made the 
revolution of the 2d of December against the twenty-five 
francs. 





* Presidents of Corps Legislatif and Senate, 
j They are six, 


CirA BY Ede Ve 
THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS. 


WE have just seen what the legislature, the administra- 
tion, and the budget are. And justice—what they called 
formerly the Court of Appeal’s—is no longer anything but 
the recorder’s office for the registering of courts-martial. A 
soldier goes out of the guard-house, and writes on the 
margin of the law-book, J wzl/, or J will not, Throughout, 
the corporal orders and the magistrate countersigns. 
**Come, tuck up your robes; march, orifnot! . .. .” 
Hence these judgments, these arrests, these abominable 
condemnations! What a sight is this troop of judges, 
with their heads down and their backs bent, led with the 
crosier on their loins into iniquities and baseness. 

And the liberty of the press! what shall I say of it? Is 
it not laughable simply to pronounce the word? This 
press free, an honor to the French mind, light brought 
‘to bear from all points at the same time on all questions ; 
perpetual watch of the nation? Where is it? What has 
M: Bonaparte done with it? It is where the Zriune is. 
In Paris twenty journals annihilated ; in the departments 
eighty ; a hundred journals suppressed. That is to say, 
when you only look at the material side of the question, 
the bread taken out of the mouths of innumerable families. 
That is to say, remember it, bourgeois, a hundred houses 
confiscated, a hundred farms taken from their owners, a 
hundred coupons of the funds torn out of the great book. 


62 Napoleon the Litile. 


Profound identity of principles! Liberty suppressed is 
property destroyed! Let the idiotic egotists who are ap- 
plauders of the coup d’état reflect on this. 

For a law regulating the press, a decree resting on 
it; a fet-fa; a firman* dated from the imperial stirrup; 
the régime of fulmination! One recognizes it, this régime ; 
one sees it every day at work. It needed these people to 
invent this thing. Never has despotism shown itself more 
clumsily insolent than in this kind of censorship of the 
morrow, which precedes and announces the suppression, 
and which gives the bastinado to a journal before suppress- 
ing it. In this government the silly corrects the atrocious 
and tempers it. Every decree on the press can be summed 
up in one line: ‘‘I permit you to speak, but I enact that 
you shall hold your tongue.” Who then is reigning? Is it 
Tiberius? Is it Schahabaham? Three-quarters of the 
republican journalists transported or proscribed, the rest 
driven by the mixed commissions, dispersed, wandering, 
hidden ; here and there in four or five surviving journals, 
in four or five independent journals, but watched, and with 
the cudgel of Maupas hanging over their heads, fifteen or 
twenty writers, courageous, serious, pure, honorable, gene 
erous, who write with the chain about their neck and the 


ball at their foot. Talent between two sentries, independ- 
ence gagged, honesty guarded under the eye, and Veuilloty 


crying: I am free! 





* Persian term, 
+ A bigotted Catholic writer, 


CHAPTER, Vis. 
NOVELTIES IN POINT OF LEGALITY. 


Tue press has the right of being censured, the right of 
being warned, the right of being suppressed ; it has even 
the right of being judged. Judged? By whom? By the 
tribunals, What tribunals? The correctional tribunals. 

And this excellent picked jury, what is it? Progress is 
far outrun. The jury is far behind us. We return to the 
government judges. ‘‘Suppression is more rapid and 
efficacious,” as Master Rouher* says. ‘‘And then it is bet- 
ter. Call the causes, police correctional Sixteenth Cham- 
ber ; first matter of business: the man named Roumage, 
swindler; second affair, the man named Laumenais, f 
writer. This has a good effect, and accustoms the Bour- 
geois to say indiscriminately a writer and a swindler. As- 
suredly there is an advantage in that, but in a practical 
point of view, from the point of view of ‘‘ the repression.” 
Is.the government altogether sure of what it is doing in this 
thing. Is it entirely sure that the Sixteenth Chamber will 
be worth much more than that good Court of Assizes in 
Paris, which had such abjects to preside over it as Partar- 
rieu-Lafosse, and men as low as Suins and as dull as 
Mongis to harangue it? 

Can it reasonably hope that the correctional judges will 
be still more cowardly and contemptible than that? These 


* Late President of the Senate. 
¢ A Liberal, formerly a Roman Catholic priest. 


64 Napoleon the Little. 


judges, all paid though they be, will they work better than 
that small knot of a jury which had the public minister for 
corporal and which pronounced condemnations and ges- 
ticulated verdicts with the precision of the charge in twelve 
time, so well that Carlier, the prefect of police, said good- 
naturedly to a celebrated advocate, M. Desm: ‘‘The 
jury 1 What a blockhead of an institution! When one 
does not make it, it never condemns; when one does 
make it, it condemns always.” 

Let us lament this honest jury that Carlier made and that 
Rouher unmade. This government feels itself hideous. It 
does not desire any portrait, much less any looking-glass ; 
like the osprey, it takes refuge in the night. If one saw 
it, it would die of it. But it wishes to live. It does not 
hear that they are speaking of it, nor what they say of it. 
It has imposed silence on the press of France. We have 
just seen how.: - But they make the press of France keep 
silence ; that is only a half success. They want to make 
foreigners hold their tongues. They tried lawsuits in Bel- 
gium. A lawsuit against the Bulletin Frangais and one 
against Za Nation. The loyal Belgian jury brought in a 
verdict of acquittal, That was inconvenient. What shall 
one do? They take the Belgian journals by the ‘purse. 
You have subscribers in France; if you discuss us you 
shall not come in. Do you want to enter? be pleasant. 
They try to take hold of the English journals by fear. ‘‘If 
you discuss us (decidedly one does not wish to be dis- 
cussed!) we will drive your correspondents out of 
France.” The English press broke out into a roar of 
laughter. But this is not all. There are French writers out- 
side of France. They are proscribed—that is to say, free! 


Napoleon the Little. 65 


If they are going to speak, these people; if they are going 
to write, these demagogues (they are quite capable of it), 
we must stop them ; how shall we do it? Gagthem at a 
distance? ‘That is not so easy. M. Bonaparte has not an 
arm long enough for that. Let us try, however, and have 
a lawsuit brought against them where,they are. So be it. 
The juries of free countries will understand that the pro- 
scribed represent justice, and that the Bonapartist govern- 
ment is iniquity. These juries will do what the Belgian 
juries did. They will acquit. Let us pray friendly govern- 
ments to expel these expelled men ; to banish these ban- 
ished. So be it. The proscribed will go elsewhere. They 
will always find a corner of the earth free, where they can 
speak. What shall be done to reach them? Rouher 
clubs with Baroche,* and between them both they have hit 
upon this: fasten a law on crimes, committed by French- 
men abroad, and slip in among these crimes, offensive publi- 
cations, The Council of State said yes, and the Corps Legis- 
latif did not say no. To-day the thing is in force. If we 
speak outside of France, they judge us in France. Prison 
in the future in case of need ; fines and confiscations. So 
be it still. This book on which I write will then be judged 
in France, and the author duly sentenced. I expect it, and 
I confine myself to anticipating the individuals, whoever 
they may be, calling themselves magistrates, who in black 
robes or in red robes shall plot the thing, by saying, the 
case having come up, the condemnation to the utmost limit 
of the law having been handsomely and well. pronounced, 
that nothing can equal my disdain for the judgment, except 
my contempt for the judge. That is my plea, 


* Lately Minister of Justice and Worship, 


CHAPTER WEL 
THE ADHERENTS. 


Wuo are grouped about the establishment? We have 
said; the bosom heaves as we reflect on it. Ah! these 
men of the government of to-day, we the proscribed of the 
moment, we remember them when they were the repre- 
sentatives of the people. Only a year ago and they were 
going and coming in the lobbies of the Assembly, with their 
heads up, and with expression of independence, and with the 
gait and air of men who belonged to themselves. How 
proud, and how bold they were, and how they put their 
hands upon their hearts and cried: Vive la République ; and 
if, on the tribune, any terrorist, any man of the mountain, * 
if any ‘‘ reds” made allusion to a coup d’état arranged by 
conspiracy, of an empire which had been projected, how they 
shouted at him, ‘‘ You are a slanderer ;” how they shrugged 
their shoulders at the suggestion of the Senate. The empire 
to-day, cried the one, it would be mud and blood: you 
slander us, we will never havea hand in it. Another affirmed 
that he only held the office of minister of the President for 
the purpose of devoting himself to the defense of the Con- 
stitution and the laws. Another glorified the tribune as the 
palladium of the country. Another recalled the oath of 
Louis Bonaparte, and said, ‘‘ Do you doubt that he is an 


* Extreme revolutionist, named from the mountain, a certain row of seats 
in the Corps Legislatif. 


Napoleon the Little. 67 


honest man?” These two last went so far as to vote and 
sign his forfeiture the 2d of December in the mayoralty 
of the tenth district. Another sent on the 4th of De- 
cember a note to him who writes these lines to felicitate 
him on having dictated the proclamation of the left, which 
outlawed Louis Bonaparte. 

And there they are, senators, councillors of state, 
ministers ; laced, galloon-laced, gilded wretches! Before 
embroidering your sleeves, wash your hands. 

M. Quentin Bauchart goes to find M. Odilon Barrot and 
tells him: ‘‘Can you comprehend the coolness of this Bo- 
naparte ? Has he not dared to offer mea place as master 
of requests?” ‘‘ You have refused?” ‘‘Assuredly.” The 
next day an offer of a place as councillor of state—twenty- 
five thousand francs—the indignant master of requests be- 
comes a softened councillor of state. M. Quentin Bauchart 
accepts. 

One class of men rally.en masse: the imbecile. They 
compose the save part of the Corps Legislatif. It is they to 
whom the chief of the state addresses this clap-trap :— 

‘* The first trial of our Constitution, which is entirely French 
in its origin, ought to have convinced you that we possess the 
elements of a government which is strong and free. Regis- 
tration is accurate; discussion is free; and the vote on 
taxes decisive. There is in France a government animated 
by good faith and by a love of the right ; which reposes on 
the people, who are the source ofall authority; on the army, 
the source of all force ; on religion, the source of all justice. 
Assure yourselves of the character of my opinions.” 

These excellent dupes we know also. We have seen a 
good number of them on the benches of the majority at the 


68 Napoleon the Little. 


Legislative Assembly. Their chiefs, clever operators, had 
succeeded in terrifying them, a sure means of leading them 
wherever they wished : these chiefs having been no longer 
able to employ the old scarecrows, the words Jacobin and 
san-culottes,* which had been decidedly too much used, had 
reinstated the word demagogue. ‘These ring-leaders, brought 
up to underhand dealings and maneuvers, speculated upon 
the word ‘‘the mountain” with success. They worked this 
terrifying and munificent souvenir seasonably. With these 
few letters of the alphabet, grouped in syllables and ac- 
cented suitably—Demagogues, Mountain-men, Socialists, 
Communists, Reds—they bleared the eyes of the silly. They 
had found means to pervert the brains of their innocent col- 
jeagues to the extent of encrusting on them, so to speak, 
kinds of dictionaries, in which each of the expressions 
which the orators and writers of the Democracy made use 
of should be found translated. For humanity, read ferocity ; 
universal welfare, read overthrow ; republic, read terrorism ; 
socialism, read pillage; fraternity, read massacre; gospel, 
read death to the rich. 

So that when an orator of the left said, for example : 
‘‘We wish the suppression of war and the abolition of 
the death penalty,” a crowd of poor people on the right 
distinctly heard: ‘‘We wish everything put to fire and 
sword,” and shook their fists with fury at the orator. After 
a speech, in which there had been no other question 
than liberty, universal peace, welfare by means of work, 
unity, and progress, one saw the representatives belong- 
ing to that set which we have described become ex- 
cited at these allusions, rise pale as ashes ; they were not 








* Expression for extreme revolutionaries, 


. Napoleon the Litife. . 69 


very sure that they were not going to be guillotined, and 
went away to look for their hats in order to see if they still 
had their heads on their shoulders. 

These poor, horrified creatures did not sell their adhesion 
on the 2d of December. It was on their account that the 
sentence, ‘‘ Louis Napoleon has saved society,” was especi- 
ally invented. And these everlasting prefects, these eternal 
mayors, these eternal aldermen, these eternal worshipers 
of the rising sun or of the lighted lamp-post, who core 
the day after success to the conqueror, or the man enjoying 
a triumph, to the master, to his majesty Napoleon the 
Great, to his majesty Louis XVIII., to his majesty Alexan- 
der I., to his majesty Charles X., to his majesty Louis 
Philippe ; to the citizen Lamartine, to the citizen Cavaignac; 
to my lord the prince-president ; on their knees, smiling, 
merry, carrying on plates the keys of their cities, and on 
their faces the keys of their consciences ! 

But the imbeciles are an old story ; imbeciles have always 
made a part of institutions, and they are almost an institution 
themselves. And as to the prefects and capitouls,* as to the 
adorers of all to-morrows, insolent with good luck and dull- 
ness that is seen in every age. Let us do justice to the régime 
of the 2d of December. It has not only such partizans as 
these, it has adherents, and creatures which belong to it 
alone. Nations do not always know how rich they are in the 
matter of rogues. There is needed this kind of overthrow, 
this sort of removing, to make them see the truth. Then 
peoplé are filled with wonder at what comes out of the 
dust! Itis splendid to contemplate. A man who wore 





* Municipal officers of Toulouse, 


70 Napoleon the Little. 


shoes and clothing, and had a reputation such as to make 
all the puppies in Europe cry after him, springs up an 
ambassador. This other, within sight of Bricétre and La 
Roquette,* wakes up a general and great eagle of the 
Legion of Honor. Every adventurer has an official coat on 
his back, accommodates himself with a pillow crammed with 
bank-notes, takes a sheet of white paper and writes on it, 
‘‘End of my adventures. You know such a man well? 
Yes ; he is in the galleys? No; he is a minister.” 





* Prisons, 


CHAPTER VIII. 
MENS AGITAT MOLEM. 


In the center is the man; the man of whom we have 
spoken ; the Carthaginian,* the fatal man ; attacking civil- 
ization in order to arrive at power ; looking for one knows 
not what ferocious popularity, elsewhere than among the 
true people ; speculating on those traits of the peasant and 
the soldier which still remain savage ; trying to succeed by 
coarse egotisms, by brutal passions, by awakened envies, 
excited appetites ; something like Marat, a prince, to hit 
the nail almost on the head, who in Marat’s house was 
great, and who in Louis Bonaparte’s is little? —The man who 
kills, transports, exiles, expels, proscribes, and plunders, 
this man with languid gesture, with glassy eye, who walks 
with a preoccupied air in the midst of the horrible 
things which he has done like a sort of sinister somnam- 
bulist. They said of Louis Bonaparte, perhaps with a good, 
perhaps with an evil meaning, for these beings have strange 
flatterers : ‘‘ He isa dictator, he isa despot, nothing more.” 

He is that in our opinion, and he is also something 
else. 

The dictator was a magistrate. Titus Livius,f and 
Cicero,{ call him pretor maximus ; Seneca § calls him 





* Allusion to Punic faith, proverbially bad. 
{ Lib, vii. cap. 34. { De Republica, lib. i. cap, 40. 
3 Ep. 108. 


72 Napoleon the Little. 


magister populi. What he decreed was held as a decree 
from above. ‘Titus Livius* says, pro numine observatum. 
In those days of incomplete civilization, the rigidity of 
ancient laws not having foreseen everything, his function 
was to provide for the safety of the people. He was the 
product of this text, Salus populi suprema lex esto. He had 
the twenty-five axes, which were the signs of the power of 
--life and death, brought before him. He was above and 
outside of the law, but he could not touch the law. The 
dictatorship was a veil behind which the law remained 
entire. The law was before the dictatorship and after the 
dictatorship. She seized the man again as he went out 
of office. He was appointed for a very short time—six 
months. ‘‘ Semestris dictatura,” says Titus Livius, lib. vi. 
cap. 1. Habitually, and as if this enormous power, although 
. freely assented to by the people, always ended by weighing 
a man down like remorse, the dictator abdicated before the 
end of the term. Cincinnatus went out of office at the 
end of eight days. The dictator was forbid to dispose of 
the public moneys without authority from the Senate ; also 
to leave Italy. He could not ride without the permission 
of the people. He might bea plebeian. Marcus Rutilus 
and Publius Philo were dictators. They appointed dicta- 
tors for various reasons—to establish fetes on the.occasions 
- of holidays, to drive a sacred nail into the walls of the. 
temple of Jupiter, once to name the Senate. Republican 
Rome had eighty-eight dictators. This intermissive insti- 
tution lasted one hundred and sixty-three years, from the 
552d to the 711th year of Rome. It commenced with 


*- Lib, lil, cap. 5. 


Napoleon the Little. 7a 


od 


Servilius Geminus, and reached to Cesar submitting to 
Sulla. With Caesar it expired. The dictatorship was 
made to be repudiated by Cincinnatus and married by 
Cesar. Cesar was five times dictator in five years, from 
706 to 711. This magistracy was dangerous. It finished 
by devouring liberty. 

Is M. Bonaparte a dictator? We do not see any incon- 
venience in answering—yes. Ishe Preetor-Maximus, gene- 
ral-in-chief? The flag saluteshim. Ishe Magister Populi, 
master of the people? Ask the cannons pointed on the 
public squares. Pro numuine observatum—held to be God? 
Ask M. Troplong. He has nominated the Senate ; he has in- 
stituted holidays ; he has provided for the safety of society ; 
he has driven a sacred nail into the wall of the Pantheon, 
and he has hung on this nail his coup d'état. Only he 
makes and unmakes the law at his caprice. He puts his 
hand familiarly, and without authority from the Senate, 
into the pocket of the public; he rides without permis- 
sion ; and as to six months, he takes a little longer time. 
Ceesar took five years—he takes twice it. That is correct. 
Julius Cesar five ; Louis Bonaparte ten. Proportion is 
well preserved. 

From the dictator let us pass to the despot. It is the 
other title almost accepted by M. Bonaparte. Let us use the 
language of the lower empire a little. It suits the subject. 
The Despotés came after the Basileus.s He had among 
other powers that of general of infantry and cavalry, 
magister utrinsque exercitus. It was the Emperor Alexis, 
surnamed the Angel, who created the dignity of despotés. 
The despotés was less than the emperor and above the 
Sebastocrator, or Augustus, and above Cesar. One sees 

4 


74 Napoleon the Little. 


that he is this, also, to some degree. M. Bonaparte is de- 
spotés when you admit, which is perfectly easy, that Mag- 
nan is Cesar, and that Maupas* is Augustus. 

Despotés, dictator? It is admitted. All this great éclat, 
all this triumphant power, cannot prevent the bringing into 
notice little incidents like the following, happening in 
Paris—incidents which honest Cockneys, witnesses of the 
fact, relate to you most pensively :—Two men are walking 
along the street, talking of their affairs and their trades. 
One of the two speaks of some rogue or other of whom 
he thinks he has cause to complain. ‘‘ He is a wretch,” 


2 


says he, ‘‘a swindler, a beggar.” An agent of the police 
hears these last words. ‘‘ Sir,” says he, ‘‘you are speaking 
of the President. I arrest you.” 

Now, will M. Bonaparte be or will he not be Emperor ? 
Beautiful question! He is master, he is cadi, mufti, bey, 
dey, soudan, grand-khan, grand-lama, great-mogul, great- 
dragon, cousin to the sun, commander of believers, schah, 
czar, sophi, and caliph. Paris is no longer Paris, it is 
Bagdad, with a Giafar who is called Persigny,{ and a 
Scheherazade who risks having her neck cut off every 
morning, and whose name is the Constifutionnel.§ M. 
Bonaparte can do whatever he pleases with goods, with 
families, and persons. If French citizens wish to know 
the depth of the government into which they have fallen, 
they have only to ask a few questions of each other. Let 
us see. Judge—he tears off your robe and sends you to 





* Prefect of police. 

+ He had not yet been declared Emperor. 

{ Minister of the Interior, and now a duke, 
¢ A Bonapartist newspaper. 


‘ 


Napoleon the Little. #9 


prison. What then? Let us see. Senate, Council of State, 
Corps Legislatif—he seizes a shovel and makes a heap in 
the corner of you. After that? You, landlord, he con- 
fiscates your summer house and your winter house, with 
courts, stables, gardens, and dependencies. After that? 
You, father, he takes your daughter; you, brother, he 
takes your sister ; you, bourgeois, he takes your wife with 
authority, by main force. After that? You, passer-by, 
your countenance displeases him, he shoots you through 
the head with a pistol, and goes back into his house. 
After that? All these things having been done, what re- 
sults from them? Nothing. My lord the prince-president 
has taken his usual drive in the Champs Elysées to-day, in a 
barouche, ala Daumont, drawn by four horses, accompanied 
by a single aide-de-camp. That is what the journals will 
say. He has erased from the walls Liberty, Equality, Fra- 
ternity. He was right. Ah, Frenchmen, you are no 
longer either free (the strait-jacket is there), nor equal 
(the military man is everything), nor brothers (civil war 
hatches martial under this lugubrious peace law). Em- 
peror? Why not? He hasa Maury,* who is called Si- 
bour ;f he has a Fontanes, t a Faciuntasinos, if you like it 
better, which is called Fourtoul ; he has a La Place, who 
answers to the name of Leverrier, but who did of write 
the Mecanique Céleste. He will easily find Esmenards 
and Luce de Lancivals. His Pius VII. is at Rome, in 
the cassock of Pius IX. His green uniform they saw 
at Strasbourg; his eagle—they saw it in Boulogne; his 





* A play on the word which literally means ‘¢ they make asses,” 
+ Archbishop of Paris, 
ft Tools of the First Emperer. 


76 Napoleon the Little. 


gray overcoat—did he not wear it at Ham? casaque, or 
redingate, * it is all one. Madame de Staél has just made 
him a call. She has written Zea, He smiles on her 
while he is waiting to exile her. Are you expecting 
an arch-duchess? Wait a moment; he will have one. 
Tu felix Austria nube, His Murat calls himself St. Amand, f 
His Talleyrand, Morny.{ His Duke d’Enghieu§ is called 
the right. See, what does he lack? Nothing ; scarcely any- 
thing; scarcely Austerlitz and Marengo. Resign your- 
self to it; he is emperor in heart. One of these mornings 
he will be it in the face of day. It only lacks one entirely 
trifling formality to sanctify and crown at Notre Dame 
his false oath. After which it will be fine. Hold yourself 
in readiness for an imperial play ; expect caprices ; expect 
surprises, stupors, wonderings, alliances of words the most 
unheard of, jarring sounds the most fearless ; expect Prince 
Troplong, Duke Maupas, Duke Mimerel, Marquis Le- 
beeuf, Baron Baroche! In line, courtiers! hats low, sena- 
tors! The stable opens; my lord, the horse is consul. 
Let them have the oats of his highness Incitatus gilded. 
Everything will hang down : the gulf of the public will be 
prodigious; all enormities will pass; the antique fly- 
catcher will disappear, and will make room for the whale- 
catcher. 

For us who speak, from the present time the empire 


* Two kinds of overcoats. 
+ Minister of War. 
{ At one time Minister of Interior. 


@ Arrested and murdered by the First Napoleon outside of the limits of 
France. The other names just mentioned are those of prominent men in 
the employ of the First Emperor. 


Napoleon the Little. 7 


exists, and without expecting the proverb of the Senatus- 
Consultum, and the comedy of the Plebiscitum, we send 
this circular note to inform Europe that the treason of the 
2d of December is confined with the empire. Mother and 
child are doing badly. 


CHAPTER IX 
OMNIPOTENCE. 


Let us forget this man’s 2d of December. Let us for- 
get his origin. Let us see what he is as to political capacity. 
Do you want to judge him for the eight months that he 
has reigned? Look at his power on the one hand, and his 
acts on the other. 

What can he do? Everything. What has he done? Noth- 
ing. With this full power during eight months, a man of 
genius might have changed the face of France, of Europe 
perhaps. 

He could not assuredly have effaced the crime of his 
setting out, but he might have covered it up. By dint of 
material ameliorations he might have succeeded in masking 
from the nation his moral abasement. Even, it is necessary 
to confess, even for a dictator of genius the thing was not 
hard. A certain number of social problems, elaborated in 
these last years by several robust minds, seemed ripe, and 
could have received, to the great profit and contentment of 
the people, both actual and relative solutions. Louis Bona- 
parte did not himself appear to doubt of it; he has come 
up with—he has caught a glimpse of none. He has not 
even found again at the Elysée a few of the old remnants of 
the socialistic meditations in which he indulged at Ham. 

He has added several crimes to his first crime, and in 
that he has been logical. These crimes excepted, he has 


Napoleon the Little. 79 


produced nothing. Omnipotence complete, initiative none. 
He has taken France and does not know what to do 
with her. In truth, one is tempted to pity this eunuch 
struggling with omnipotence. Assuredly this dictator be- 
stirs himself, let us do him this justice ; he does not remain 
a moment quiet ; he feels with fear that he is surrounded 
with darkness and solitude. Those who are afraid in the 
dark sing, but he moves about. He turns everything topsy- 
turvy ; he touches everything ; he runs after projects; not 
being able to create, he decrees ; he tries to mislead as to his 
nothingness ; it is perpetual motion ; but, alas! that wheel 
turns empty. The conversion of the rentes, where is the profit 
of them to this day? A saving of eighteen millions ; be it 
so. The rente-holders lose them, but the President and the 
Senate, with their two endowments, pocket them ; benefit to 
France : zero. Landed credit? the cash does not arrive. 
Railroads? one decrees them and then one withdraws them. 
He is in all things as he was in the working-men’s cities, 
Louis Bonaparte subscribes, but he does not pay. As to 
the budget—as to this budget checked by the blind. men 
who are in the Council of State, and voted by the dumb men 
who are in the Corps Legislatif, the abyss opens beneath it. 
Nothing was possible or could have been efficacious but 
the greatest economy in the army: two hundred thousand 
soldiers left in their homes, two hundred millions saved. 
Come, then, try to touch the army. The soldier, who will be- 
come once more free, will applaud; but what will the officer 
say? And in reality it is not the soldier, it is the officer that 
one caresses. And then, it is necessary to guard Paris, and 
Lyons, and all the cities ; and later, when one shall be em- 
peror, it will be quite necessary to make a little war in Europe 


80 Napoleon the Little. 


See the gulf! If from financial questions one passes to 
political institutions, oh! there the neo-Bonapartists brighten 
up ; there are creations! What creations? Good God! A 
Constitution of the style of Ravrio, we have just viewed 
her, decked with palmettoes, swans’ necks, carried to the 
Elysée with old arm-chairs in the carriages of the yeomen 
of this store; the Senate, the conservative force, sewed up 
again, re-gilded ; the Council of State of 1806, dressed and 
re-trimmed with a few new laces ; the old Corps Legislatif, 
repaired and re-painted, with Lainé away and Morny added. 
For the liberty of the press, the bureau of the public mind ; 
for individual liberty, the minister of police. All these in- 
stitutions (we have passed them under review) are nothing 
else in the world but an old piece of parlor furniture be- 
longing to the Empire. Beat the dust, take out the cobwebs, 
splash the whole with stains of French blood, and you have 
the establishment of 1852. This odds and ends governs 
France. These are the creations! Where is good sense? 
Where is reason? Where is truth? There is not a sane part 
of contemporaneous intellect which is not run foul of, not 
a righteous acquisition of the century which has not been 
cast to the earth and shattered. Every extravagant device 
has become possible. What we see since the 2d of Decem- 
ber, is a mediocre’ man, who has been seized with a freak, 
galloping across the absurd. These men, the malefactor 
and his accomplices, have an immense power, incomparable, 
and absolute, and unlimited, and sufficient, we repeat it, to 
change the face of Europe. They make use of it in en- 
joying themselves. To amuse one’s self, and to enrich one’s 
self, that is their ‘‘socialism.” They have stopped the 
budget on the high road ; the coffers lie there open ; they 


Napoleon the Little. 81 


fill their saddle-bags; they have money, do you wish 
some? there issome, All salaries are doubled and tripled. 
We have given some of the figures above. Three minis- 
ters, Turgot (there is a Turgot in this affair), Persigny, 
and Maupas have each a million of secret funds ; the Senate 
hasa million ; the Council of State a half-million ; the officers 
of the 2d of December have a Napoleonic month, that is 
to say, some millions; the soldiers of the 2d of December 
have medals, that is to say, some millions. M. Murat 
wishes millions and has them ; a minister gets married, 
speedily, a half-million ; M. Bonaparte, QuiA NoMINOR PoLEo, 
has twelve millions, plus four millions, sixteen millions. 
Millions, millions! This régime is called Million. M. 
Bonaparte has three hundred useless and costly horses, the 
fruits and vegetables of the national castles and of the parks 
and gardens which were royal in days of yore; he over- 
flows ; he said the other day, ‘‘ AW my carriages,” as Charles 
V. said, ‘* All my Spains,” and as Peter the Great said, ‘‘ All 
my Russias.” The nuptials of Gamache are at the Elysée. 
The steaks turn night and day before the bonfires ; they con- 
sume there; these bills are published; they are the bulletins 
of the new empire—six hundred and fifty pounds of meat 
aday. The Elysée will soon have a hundred and forty- 
nine cooks like the chateau de Schcenbrunn ; they drink, 
they eat, they laugh, they banquet : 2 banquet at the houses 
of all the ministers, a banquet at the Ecole Militaire, a 
banquet at the Hotel de Ville, a banquet at the Tuileries, 
a monstrous féte on the 1oth of May, a féte still more 
monstrous on the 15th of August. One swims in all the 
abundance and in all the drunkenness. And the man of 
the people, the poor day-laborer, whose work has failed, 


82 Napoleon the Little. 


the workman in rags, with naked feet, to whom the summer 
brings no bread and the winter no wood, whose aged 
mother lies languishing upon a foul straw mattress, whose 
young daughter prostitutes herself at the corners of the 
streets to live, whose little children shiver with hunger, 
fever, and cold, in the paltry lodging-houses of the Faubourg 
Saint-Marceau, in the garrets of Rouen, in the cellars of 
Lisle, do they think of him? What becomes of him? 
What do they do for him? Die, dog! 


CPE AcP ei Ke: 
THE TWO PROFILES OF M. BONAPARTE. 


THE curious thing is, that they should wish that one 
should respect them. A general is venerable, a minister is 
sacred. The Countess de Aud|——, a young lady of 
Brussels, was in Paris in March, 1852. She happened one 
day to be in a drawing-room in the Faubourg St. Honoré. 
M. de P. entered ; Madame de Audl , wishing to leave 
the place, passed before him, and it happened that while 
she was probably thinking of something else she raised her 
shoulders. M. de P. perceived it; the next day Madame 
de Audl is notified that henceforth, under pain of 
expulsion from France, as a representative of the people, 
she must abstain from all signs of approbation or disappro- 











bation when she sees ministers. Under this corporal gov- 
ernment, and under this constitution of instructions, all 
marches with military precision. The French people go 
to the order to see how they are to rise, lie down, dress 
themselves, in what toilet they can go to a trial at the 
tribunal or to the soirée of the prefect. A prohibition 
against making mediocre verses; a prohibition against 
wearing a beard, the shirt-frill, and the white cravat, are 
laws of the State. Regulation, discipline, passive obedi- 
ence, the eyes cast down, silence in the ranks, such is the 
yoke under which the nation bows down at this moment— 
the nation of leadership and liberty, great revolutionary 
France. The reformer will only stop when France shall be 


84 Napoleon the Little. 


enough a barrack for the generals to say, ‘‘ Very well,” and 
sufficiently a seminary for the bishops to say, ‘‘It will do |” 
Do you like the soldier? They have put him everywhere. 
The municipal council of Toulouse gives in its resignation ; 
the prefect, Chapuis Montlaville, replaces the mayor by a 
colonel, the first assistant by a colonel, and the second 
assistant by a colonel.* 

The warriors take the wall. ‘*The soldiers,” says Mably, 
“‘thinking themselves to be in the place of the citizens who 
had formerly made the consuls, dictators, censors, and 
tribunes, associated the government of emperors with a 
kind of military democracy.” Have you a shako on your 
skull? Do what you like. A young man, returning from 
a ball, passes down Richelieu Street before the door of the 
Bibliothéque ; the sentinel takes aim at him and kills him ; 
the next day the journals say, ‘‘The young man is dead,” 
and that is all. Timour-Beig accorded to his companions- 
in-arms, and to their descendants to the seventh generation, 
the right of impunity for any crime whatsoever, except the 
delinquent had committed the crime nine times. The 
sentry of Richelieu Street has eight more citizens to kill 
before being delivered over to a court-martial. It pays 
well to be a soldier, but it does not pay to be a citizen. 
‘At the same time they dishonor this unfortunate army. 
The 3d of September they decorated the commissioners 
who arrested its generals and representatives. It is true 
that it received itself two louis a-man. O shame on all 
sides! Money to the soldiers and the cross to the spies. 





* These three colonels are Messrs, Galhassou, Dubarry, and Poly- 
carp, 


Napoleon the Little. 85 


Jesuitism and corporalism, that is this régime complete. 
All the political expediency of M. Bonaparte is composed 
of two hypocrisies. A soldier's hypocrisy directed toward 
the army, a Catholic hypocrisy directed toward the clergy. 
When it is not Fracasse, it is Basile. Sometimes it is both 
together. In this fashion he succeeds in enrapturing at the 
same time Montalembert, who does not believe in France, 
and St. Arnaud, who does not believe in God. 

Does the dictator smell the incense? Does he smell the 
tobacco? Examine; he smells the incense and the tobacco. 
O France, what a government! The spurs submit to the 
cassock, the coup d’état goes to mass, belabors the common 
soldiers, reads its breviary, embraces Catin,* tells its beads, 
empties the pots, and receives the sacrament at Easter. The 
coup d'état affirms what is dubious, viz., that we have re- 
turned to the epoch of jacqueries; what is certain, is, that it 
has taken us back to the time of the Crusades. Czesar takes 
the cross for the pope. Diex el volt.f The Elysée has 
the faith of the templar, and the thirst too. To enjoy and 
live well let us repeat it, and to eat the budget, to believe 
nothing, to turn everything to profit, to compromise at once 
two holy things, military honor and religious faith ; to stain 
the altar with blood, and the flag with holy-water ; to make 
the soldier ridiculous, and the priest somewhat ferocious; to 
mingle with this grand political swindle which he calls his 
power, the church, and the nation, Catholic consciences, 
and patriotic consciences. That is the method of Bonaparte 
the Little, 

All his acts, from the most enormous to the most puerile, 





* Throws a kiss to the girls, 
¢ Motte on the Crusader’s shield, 


86 Napoleon the Little. 


from that which is hideous to that which is laughable, are 
stamped with this double dealing. For example, the national 
solemnities annoy him, the 24th of February and the 4th of 
May; he then has troublesome recollections which return 
obstinately on the day fixed. An anniversary is an intrusion. 
Let us suppress the anniversaries. Be it so. Let us only 
keep one feast, ourown. Admirably well. But with one feast, 
only one, how can we satisfy both parties? the soldier party 
and the priest party. The soldier party is Voltairian, at 
what Canrobert will smile at, Riancy will greet with a grim- 
ace. What shall be done? You shall see. Great jugglers 
are not embarrassed at such a trifle. The J/oniteur declares 
one fine morning that there shall be henceforth only one 
national fete, the 15th of August. At this, as semi-official 
commentary, the two masks of the dictator set themselves to 
remark :—The 15th of August, says the mouth-Ratapoil,* 
the day of St. Napoleon—The 15th of August, says the 
mouth-Tartuffe, ¢ the féte of the Holy Virgin! On one side, 
the 2d of December inflates its cheeks, swells its voice, 
draws its great saber, and cries ‘‘Sacre bleu,”’ grumblers, let 
us féte Napoleon the Great! On the other, it casts down its 
eyes, makes the sign of the cross, and mutters: My very 
dear brethren, let us adore the Sacred Heart of Mary! The 
government for the time being—a hand soaked in blood 
which dips its finger in holy-water. 


* A general, 7 A hypocrite. 


Creare ly ree oe ke 
RECAPITULATION. 


But they tell us, ‘‘ don’t you go rather far? are you not 
unjust ? concede him something. Has he notin a certain 
measure made socialism?” and they put again upon the 
tapis the landed credit, the railroads, the falling of the 
funds, etc. We have already appreciated those measures 
at their just value ; but in admitting that this was socialism 
you would be simple in attributing the merit of itto M. 
Bonaparte. It is not he who made socialism, it is time. 
A man swims against a rapid current, he wrestles with un- 
heard-of efforts, he strikes the wave with his fist, with his 
forehead, with his shoulder, with his knee. You say he 
will make headway ; a moment after, you look at him—he 
has lost ground. He is much further down the river than 
he was at the time of his setting out. Without knowing it, 
or having a suspicion, at every effort which he makes he 
loses ground. He imagines he is getting up again and 
he is always going down. He thinks that he is gaining 
and he loses. Landed credit, as you say, fall of the 
funds, as you say, M. Bonaparte has already made several 
of those decrees that you wish so much to characterize as 
socialistic, and he will make more. If M. Changarnier 
had triumphed instead of M. Bonaparte, he would 
have made them. If Henry the Fifih* would return to- 
morrow he would make some. The Emperor of Austria is 





* Candidate of the legitamists, the Count of Chambord, 


88 Napoleon the Little. 


making some in Gallicia, and the Emperor Nicholas in 
Lithuania. In short, and after all, what does this prove? 
That this current, which is called Revolution, is stronger than 
the swimmer, who is called Despotism. But this same 
socialism, M. Bonaparte, what is it? That socialism? I deny 
it. Hatred of the Bourgeoisie, be it so. Socialism? No! 
See the ministry which was socialistic par excellence, the 
ministry of agriculture and commerce, he has abolished it. 
What does he give you in compensation? The ministry of 
the police. The other socialistic ministry is the ministry 
of public instruction ; it is in danger; one of these morn- 
ings they will suppress it. The point of departure of 
socialism is education; it is gratuitous and obligatory 
teaching,—it is light. It is to take the children and make 
men of them, to take the men and make citizens of them, 
—citizens intelligent, honest, useful, and happy. 
Intellectual progress at first, moral progress at first, 
material progress follows. The two first progresses of 
themselves and irresistibly bring on the last. What does M. 
Bonaparte do? He persecutes and stifles instruction every- 
where. There is an outcast in our France to-day ; it is the 
school-master. Have you never reflected on what a school- 
master is to that magistracy to which tyrants formerly flew 
for refuge like criminals to the temple seeking a place of 
asylum? Have you ever considered what the man who 
teaches the children is? You enter the house of a cart- 
wright ; he is making wheels and poles ; you say that he is 
a useful man. You enter the house of a weaver; he is 
making cloth, and you say that is a valuable man. You 
enter the house of a smith making mattocks, hammers, and 
ploughshares ; you say that is a necessary man. These 


Napoleon the Little. 89 


men, these good works, you salute. You enter the house 
of a school-master, make a lower bow. Do you know what 
he is making? He is making minds. He is the cartwright, 
the weaver, the forger of that work in which he aids God, 
the future. Well, to-day, thanks to the reigning party of 
priests, how little necessary it is that the school-master should 
work on this future, and how necessary it is that the future 
should be made of shadow and of brutishness, and not of 
intelligence and light. 

Do you want to know in what fashion they make this 
humble and grand magistrate, the school-master, work ? 
He serves mass, sings at the chorister’s desk, sounds ves- 
pers, arranges the chairs, renews the bouquets before the 
Sacred Heart, and furbishes the chandeliers before the altar, 
dusts the tabernacle, folds the copes and chasubles, keeps 
in order and keeps an account of the linen of the sacristy, 
puts oil in the lamps, beats the cushions of the confes- 
sional, sweeps the church and sometimes the presbytery. 
The time which remains to him he can, if it seems good to 
him, make the little children spell A, B, C, on condition 
that they shall pronounce none of these three words of the 
demon, Country, Republic, Liberty. M. Bonaparte strikes 
instruction above and below, below to please the curates, 
above to please the bishop; at the same time that he tries 
to shut up the village school he mutilates the college of 
France; he throws down, or he upsets with a kick, the chairs 
of Quinet and of Michelet. One fine morning he declares 
by decree, that Greek and Latin letters are suspected, and he 
interdicts as much as he can the intercourse of intelligence 
with the old poets and historians of Athens and of Rome, 
scenting in A‘schylus and in Tacitus, a vague odor of dema- 


go Napoleon the Little. 


gogueism. He puts physicians, for example, with one 
stroke of the pen, outside of literary learning, instruction, 
which made Dr. Serres say, ‘‘ There we are dispensed by de- 
cree from the obligation of knowing how to read and write.” 
New taxes; sumptuary taxes; vestry taxes; memo audeat ~ 
comedere preter duo fercula cum potagio, taxes on the living ; 
taxes on the dead; taxes on successions; taxes On carriages ; 
taxes on paper. Bravo, yells the beadle party, the less books ; 
taxes on dogs, the collars will pay ; taxes on senators, the 
coats of arms will pay. Iam the man who is going to be 
popular, says M. Bonaparte, rubbing his hands ; he is the 
socialistic emperor, roar the trusty ones in the faubourgs. 
It is the Catholic emperor, murmur the bigots in the sacris- 
ties. How happy he would be if he could pass here for 
Constantine, and therefore Babceuf’* Words of order re- 
peat themselves. The adhesion declares itself; enthusiasm 
gains gradually; the Ecole Militaire designs his number with 
bayonets and pistol-barrels ; the Abbé Gaume and the Car- 
dinal Gousset applaud ; they crown his bust at the market 
with flowers. Nanterre dedicates rose-trees to him. The 
social order is decidedly saved ; property, the family, and 
religion, breathe again, and the police erect him a statue of 
bronze? Pshaw! that will do forthe uncle! Of mardk, 
tu-es Pietri super hanc pietram, zdificabo effigiam meam. f 





* An outlaw, 

+ The commission appointed by the employees of the prefecture of 
police thought that bronze was not worthy to reproduce the image of the 
prince, it will be cut in marble. On the marble they will have 
,the following inscription engraved in the luxuriant magnificence of the 
Stone: ‘Souvenir of the oath of fidelity to the prince-president, taken 
by the employees of the prefecture of police, the 20th of May, before 


Napoleon the Little. gI 


That which he attacks, and that which he pursues, and that 
which they all pursue with him; that on which they set, 
that which they wish to crush, burn, suppress, destroy, 
annihilate, is it this poor, obscure man that they call 
primary teacher? Is it this square of paper that they call 
a journal? Is it this bundle of leaves that they cali a 
book? Is it this engine, machine of wood and iron, 
that they call a press? No, it is thou, thought; it is 
thou, reason of man; it is thou, nineteenth century ; it 
is thou, providence ; it is thou,God. Wewho resist them ; 


, 


we are the ‘‘eternal enemies of order;” we are the dema- 
gogues. In the language of the Duke of Alva, to be- 
lieve in the sanctity of the human conscience, to resist the 
inquisition, to have the faggot for one’s faith, to draw the 
sword for one’s country, to defend one’s worship, one’s 
city, one’s house, one’s family, one’s God, that is called 
beggary ; in the language of Louis Bonaparte, to struggle 
for liberty, for justice, for the right; to battle for the 
cause of progress, of civilization, of France, of human- 
ity ; to wish the abolition of war, and of the death penalty ; 
to take as serious the brotherhood of men; to believe in the 
sworn oath ; to arm one’s self for the Constitution of one’s 
country; to defend the laws, that isto be a demagogue. One 
is demagogue in the nineteenth century as one was beggar 





M. Pietre, prefect of police.” The subscription among the employees, 
whose zeal it has been necessary to moderate, will be thus divided: the 
chief of division, ten francs ; the chief of bureaux, six francs; employees at 
eighteen hundred francs, three francs; at fifteen hundred francs, two 
francs; finally, at twelve hundred francs, two francs. They calculate 
that this subscription will rise higher than six thousand francs, 

{ You read in a Bonapartist correspondence, 


92, Napoleon the Litile. 


in the sixteenth. It being granted that the dictionary of 
the Academy no longer exists ; that it is dark in full noon ; 
that a cat is no longer called a cat, and Baroche is no 
longer called a rogue; that justice is a chimera ; that his- 
tory is a dream; that the Prince of Orange was a beggar, 
and the Duke of Alva a just man; that Louis Bonaparte 
is identical with Napoleon the Great; that those who violated 
the Constitution are saviors; and that those who have de- 
fended it are brigands ; in a word, that human honesty is 
dead. Be it so, then I admire this government ; it suits 
me well, it is a model of its kind ; it compresses, it re- 
presses, it oppresses, it impresses, it exiles, it mows down 
with grapeshot, it exterminates and even pardons, it makes 
authority by cannon-shots, and clemency by blows with the 
flat of a saber. 

Nurse your indignation at your ease, repeat a few in- 
corrigible bravos of the party of order, sneer, weep, spit, it’s 
all the same to us. Vive stability! All this constitutes, 
after all, a solid government. Solid? We have not yet 
had an understanding on this solidity. Solid! I admire 
this solidity. If it snowed journals in France for only two 
days, on the morning of the third one would not know 
what had become of M. Louis Bonaparte. It makes no 
difference. —The man weighs on the entire epoch ; he dis- 
figures the nineteenth century; and there will be perhaps in 
this century two or three years on which, by one cannot tell 
what ignoble trace, one will recognize that Louis Bonaparte 
has been seated. 

This man, sad to say, is now the question of all men. 
At certain epochs of history the entire human race, from 
all points of the earth, fixes its eyes on one mysterious place 


Napoleon the Little. 93 


from which it seems that the destiny of all is about to issue. 
There have been hours when the world looked at the Vat- 
ican: Gregory VII., Leo X., had there their throne. There 
_have been other hours when they contemplated the Louvre : 
Philippe-Auguste, Louis IX., Francis I., Henry IV., were 
there ; Saint Just: Charles V. considered it; Windsor: 
Elizabeth the Great reigned there ; Versailles: Louis XIV., 
surrounded by stars, shot forth his rays there ; the Kremlin : 
one caught a glimpse of Peter the Great there ; Potsdam : 
Frederick II. shut himself up there with Voltaire. ... 

To-day, hang your head, history, the universe is looking 
at the Elysée! That kind of bastard gate, guarded by two 
sentry-boxes, painted ticking color, at the end of the 
Faubourg St. Honoré, that is what the age of the civilized 
world is contemplating to-day with a kind of profound 
anxiety. . . . Ah! what is that place from which there has 
not issued one idea which is not a trap? not one action 
which is not a crime? What place is that where all that is 
cynical dwells with all that is hypocritical? What is that 
place where bishops elbow Jeanne Poisson on the staircase, 
and, as a century ago, bow down to her to the earth ; 
where Samuel Bernard laughs in a corner with Laubarde- 
mont; where Escobar enters with Gusman d’Alfarache on 
his arm ; where, frightful rumor, in a thicket in the garden 
they dispatch with the bayonet, as they say, men whom 
they do not wish to judge ; where one hears a man say toa 
woman who intercedes and who weeps: ‘‘I allow you your 
loves, allow me my hatreds!” What is that place where the 
orgy of 1852 importunes and dishonors the grief of 1815? 
Where Cesarion,* with his arms crossed or with his hands 








* The pigmy Cesar. 


94 Napoleon the Little. 


behind his back, walks under those very trees, in those very 
paths which the indignant specter of Czsar still haunts? 
This place, it is the stain of Paris; this place is the dirt- 
spot of the century ; this gate, from which all sorts of joyous 
sounds issue—flourishes of trumpets, the playing of bands, 
laughter, clashing of glasses—this gate, saluted in the day 
by battalions which pass, illuminated by night, all wide 
open with an insolent confidence, it is a sort of public 
wrong always present. The center of the world’s shame is 
there. Ah! what is France dreaming of? Assuredly, it is 
necessary to wake up this nation ; it is necessary to take its 
arm and shake it, and speak to it; it is necessary to travel 
all over the fields, to enter the villages, enter the barracks ; 
to speak to the soldier, who no longer knows what he has 
done ; to speak to the laborer, who has an engraving of the 
Emperor* in his cottage, and who votes whatever they wish 
for that reason ; it is necessary to take away from them the 
radiant phantom which they have before their eyes! The 
whole situation is nothing but an immense and fatal mis- 
take. It is necessary to throw light on this mistake ; to go 
to the bottom and to disabuse the people, the people of the 
surrounding country; to startle them ; to agitate them ; to 
stir them up ; to show them empty houses, open graves ; 
to make them touch with their fingers the horror of this 
régime. These people are good and honest. They will 
understand. Yes, peasant, they are two—the great and the 
little, the illustrious and the infamous, Napoleon and Na- 
boleon !f 

Let us give a summary of this government. Who is at 


* First Emperor. 
+ Spoken with German accent. 


Napoleon the Little. 95 


the Elysée and the Tuileries? Crime. Who sits at the 
Luxembourg? Baseness. Who sits at the palace of the 
Bourbons? Imbecility. Who sits at the d’Orsay palace? 
Corruption. Who sits at the palace of Justice? Prevarica- 
tion. And who are in the prisons, in the forts, in the cells, 
in the casemates, in the hulks, at Lambessa, at Cayenne, 
in exile? Law, honor, intelligence, liberty, right. Pro- 
scribed men, of what do you complain? you have the 
best part, , 


BOOK THIRD.— THE CRIME. 





But this government, this horrible government, hypo- 
critical and stupid ; this government which makes one hesi- 
tate between a shout of laughter and a sob; this gibbet of 
a Constitution on which all our liberties hang; this huge 
universal suffrage and this little universal suffrage; the 
first naming the president, and the last naming the legisia- 
tors ; the little saying to the huge: my lord, receive these 
millions ; the huge saying to the little: receive the assur- 
ance of my regards; this Senate, this Council of State ; 
from whence do all these things emerge?, My God! Have 
we already come to that strait that it is necessary to call it 
to recollection. From what does this government emerge? 
Look! it flows still; it smokes still, it is blood. The 
dead are far, the dead are dead. Ah! frightful thing to 
think of and to say. Shall one never give attention to 
it again? Can it be a fact that because one eats and 
drinks ; because driving flourishes ; because you, navvy, 
have work at the Bois de Boulogne ; because you, mason, 
earn four sous a day at the Louvre ; because you, banker, 
have made money on the metalliques of Vienna, or 
on the obligations of Hope & Co. ; because the titles of 
nobility are re-established ; because one can address others 
Monsieur le Compte, or Madame la Duchesse ; because 
processions march on the Féte Dieu; because one is 


Napoleon the Little. 97 


amused ; because one laughs ; because the walls of Paris 
are covered with the post-bills of fétes and of plays—will 
one forget that there are corpses beneath it all? 

Because one has been at the ball at the Ecole Militaue ; 
because one has returned home with eyes dim, head 
fatigued, dress torn, bouquet faded, and because one 
has thrown one’s self on one’s bed, and gone to sleep, 
dreaming of a certain handsome officer, shall one no longer 
remember that there is there, under the sod, in an obscure 
grave in a deep hole, in the inexorable shadow of death, 
motionless, stiff, and terrible, a multitude of human beings, 
already become shapeless, whom the worms are devouring, 
whom decomposition is consuming, who are beginning to 
mingle with the earth, who lived, worked, thought, loved, 
and who had the right to live, and—whom they have slain ? 
Ah! if one remembers it no longer, let us recall it to 
those who have forgottenit. Awake! ye who sleep. The 
dead are about to defile before your eyes. * 


* Extract from an unpublished book, entitled the Crime of the Second 
of December. By Victor Hugo. This book will be published soon. It 
will be a complete narration of the infamous event of 1851. A great 
part is already written, The author is gathering in at this moment ma- 
terials for the rest. He believes it @ propos to enter at present on a few 
details on the subject of that work which he has imposed on himself as 
a duty. 

The author must do himself the justice to say, that in writing this 
narrative, the austere occupation of his exile, he has unceasingly in 
mind the high responsibility of the historian. When it shall appear, this 
narrative will certainly provoke numerous and violent complaints. The 
author expects it. One does not hew with impunity into the living flesh 
of a contemporaneous crime, and in the hour in which it is all-powerful. 
However that may be, whatever may be the objections, more or less inter- 
ested and finally for the especial purpose that one may judge in advance 


5 


98 Napoleon the Little. 


of the merit of these objections, the author believes that he ought to ex- 
plain in what style, with what scrupulous care of the truth, this history 
shall have been written, or to speak more correctly, the verbal record has 
been drawn up. R 

This recital of the Second of December will contain, besides the general 
facts of which no one is ignorant, a very great number of unknown facts 
which will be brought to light in it for the first time. Several of these 
facts the author himself has seen, touched, crossed. Of the latter he can 
say: guaque ipse vidi et quorum pars fui, The members of the Repub- 
lican left, whose conduct has been so intrepid, have seen these facts as he 
has, and their evidence shall not be wanting. For all the rest the author 
has proceeded to a veritable judicial inquest. He has constituted himself, 
so to speak, examining magistrate, in the matter. Every actor in the 
drama, every combatant, every victim, every witness, has come to depose 
before him ; for all doubtful facts he has consulted the words, and, when 
necessary, the persons. In general, historians speak to dead facts; they 
touch them in the tomb with their judicial rods, make them arise, and 
question them. But 4e speaks only to living facts. All the details of the 
Second of December have thus passed before his eyes. He has them all 
registered, he has them all weighed; none can escape him, 

History may be able to complete this recital, but not to make it void. 
The magistrates failing of their duty, he has done it for them. When 
direct evidence from the living voice has failed him, he has sent on the spot 
one what could call a real judicial commission. He could cite similiar facts 
for which he has laid down veritable question-books of questions accord- 
ing to which he has been minutely answered. He repeats it, he has sub- 
mitted the Second of December to a long and searching examination. He 
has carried the torch as far forward as he has been able. He has, thanks 
to this inquest, nearly two hundred documents in his possession out 
of which this book will issue, There is not a fact in this recital to which, 
when the work shall have been published, the author could not put a 
name, ‘The public will comprehend that he abstains from it; they will 
comprehend that he even substitutes sometimes for the correct names, 
and even for certain indications of places, designations as little transparent 
as possible in presence of impending proscriptions. 

He does not wish to furnish a supplementary list to M. Bonaparte. 
Assuredly the author will not be more impartial, as one is accustomed 
to cry when one wishes to praise an historian, in the sketch of the 
Second of December than he is in the present volume. Impartiality ! 


Napoleon the Little. 99 


strange virtue that Tacitus does not possess. Evil to him who could re- 
main impartial before the bleeding wounds of liberty. In presence of the 
fact of December, 1851, the author feels all the human nature rise up 
within him ; he does not conceal it; and one ought to perceive it in read- 
ing him. But with him passion for the truth equals passion for the right. 
The indignant man does not lie. This history of the second of Decem- 
ber, then, he declares it, at the moment of citing a few pages from it, will 
have been written, as one has just seen, giving particulars with the most 
absolute exactness, We deem it useful to detach from it, for the present, 
and to publish here a chapter which we think will strike attention, in that 
it throws new daylight on the success of M. Louis Bonaparte. Thanks to 
the reticence of the official historiographers of the second of December, 
one does not know how near the coup d’état was to ruin, and one ignores 
altogether by what means it was saved, Let us place this last fact especi- 
ally under the eye of the reader, 


THE, DAY. OF THE FOURTH (Opa 
DECEMBER. 





CHAP PE Kh 


- 
THE COUP D'ETAT AT BAY. 


RestsTaNcE had assumed unexpected proportions ; the 
fight had become threatening. It was no longer a fight, it 
was a battle, and one in which the engagement extended 
on all sides. At the Elysée, and in the ministries, men 
grew pale. They had wanted barricades, they made them. 
All the center of Paris covered itself with improvised forts. 
The barricaded quarters formed a sort of immense uneven 
square, formed between the Halles* and Rambuteau-street 
on one side, and the Boulevards on the other, and bounded 
on the east by Temple-street, and on the west by Mont- 
martre-street. This vast network of streets, cut into all 
kinds of redoubts and intrenchments, gathered hour by 
hour a more terrible aspect, and became a sort of fortress. 
The combatants of the barricades pushed their advance 
guards even upon the quays. On the outside of the 
irregular oblong which we have just described, the barri- 
cades went up, we have said, to the Faubourg St. Martin 
and to the grounds around the canal. The school quarter, 
where the committee of resistance had sent the representa- 
tive Le Flotte, was more stirred up still than the evening 


* Great markets, 


Napoleon the Little. IOI 


before. The outskirt took fire; they beat the roll-call at the 
Batignolles; Madier de Montjau agitated Belleville. Three 
enormous barricades were constructed at the Chapel St. 
Denis. In the trading streets the bourgeois delivered up 
their guns, the women made lint; B * * * cried to us, 
coming in to the committee of resistance, all radiant, 
‘‘Things are advancing, Paris is divided !’”* 

From moment to moment the news was arriving to us, 
all the lodges of the different quarters were in communi- 
cation with us. The members of the committee were de- 
liberating and dispatching their orders and instructions 
concerning the battle on all sides, It was a moment of 
enthusiasm and of joy, and these men, again placed between 
life and death, embraced each other. ‘‘ Now,” cried Jules 
Favre, ‘‘let a regiment turn or a regiment retire, and 
Louis Napoleon is lost.” ‘*To-morrow, the Republic will 
be at the Hdtel de Ville,” said Michel (from Bourges). 

All the city was fermented, and all was boiling over. In 
the most peaceable quarters they were tearing down the post- 
bills and the decrees. In Beaubourg-street, while they were 
constructing a barricade, the women at the windows cried 
‘Courage !” The agitation reached even the Faubourg St. 


* A committee of resistance, charged with the duty of centralizing the 
action and directing the combat, which had been nominated the 2d of De- 
cember, in the evening, by the members of the left, assembled at the house 
of the representative Lafou, Quai Jemmapes, No. 2, This committee, 
which was destined to change its place of asylum twenty-seven times in four 
days, and which remained in session after some fashion night and day, did 
not cease for a single instant to act during the different crises of the 
coup d’état. It was composed of the representatives Garnot, De Flotte, 
Jules Favre, Madier de Montjau, Michel (from Bourges), Schoelcher, and 
Victor Hugo. 


102 Napoleon the Little. 


Germain. At the Hotel of Jerusalem-street, the center of 
that great spider’s net which the police stretch over Paris, 
everything was trembling. The anxiety was deep ; one 
caught a glimpse of the Republic victorious. In the court- 
yards, in the committees, in the lobbies, between clerks and 
sergeants of police, they began to speak with tenderness of 
Canssidiére.* If it is necessary to believe in what has 
transpired from that den, the prefect Maupas, so keen the 
night before, and so odiously aggressive, began to draw 
back and grow faint. He seemed to listen with terror to 
that sound of rising tide which the insurrection was 
making, the holy and legitimate insurrection of the right. 
He stuttered and stammered, the word of command died 
on his lips. ‘‘That little young man has got the colic,” 
said the old Prefect Carlier as he left him. In this alarm 
Maupas hung on Morny. The electric telegraph was in 
perpetual dialogue from the prefecture of police to the 
minister of the interior, and from the minister of the 
interior to the prefecture of police. All the most dis- 
turbing news, every sign of panic and disorder arrived, 
from the prefect to the minister, blow following blow. 
Morny, less frightened, and a man of mind at least, 
received all these shocks in his office. They say that at 
first he said-—Maupas is ill; and to this question—What 
must be done? he had answered by the telegraph—Go to 
bed! At the second he still answered, Go to bed. At the 
third he lost all patience, he replied,—Go to bed, j... 
aps + The zeal of his agents gave out; commenced 
to turn its coat. 


* Who had constructed the barricades, 
+ An obscene insult. 


Napoleon the Little. 103 


A fearless man, sent by the committee of resistance to excite 
the Faubourg St. Marceau, was arrested in Fossé-Saint- 
Victor-street, with his pockets full of the proclamations 
and decrees of the left. They had him led off toward 
the prefecture of police; he expected to be shot. As 
the squad who were taking him off were passing before 
the dead-house, St. Michael’s quay, gun-shots rattled in the 
city; the sergeant who was leading the party said to the sol- 
diers, “Go back to your posts, I will take care of the prisoner.” 
As soon as the soldiers were out ofthe way he cut the cords 
which bound the wrists of the prisoner, and said to him, 
‘“ Be off—I save your life; do not forget that it is I who set 
you at liberty. Look at me well, so as to recognize me.” 

The principal military accomplices held council. They 
discussed the question, whether it would not be necessary 
for Louis Bonaparte to quit immediately the Faubourg 
Saint Honoré, and betake himself either to the Invalides or 
the Luxemburg palace, two strategic points, easier to de- 
fend together than the Elysée. Some gave their opinion 
for the Invalides, others for the Luxemburg. 

An altercation broke out upon this subject between two 
generals. It was at this moment that the late King of 
Westphalia, Jérome Bonaparte, seeing the coup d’état totter, 
and looking out for the future, wrote this significant letter 
to his nephew :— 

‘‘My dear Nephew,—French blood has flowed, stop its 
effusion by a serious appeal to the people. Your meaning 
is misunderstood. The second proclamation, in which 
you speak of the plebiscite, is badly received by the people, 
who do not consider it an establishment of the right of 
suffrage. Liberty is without guaranty if an assembly does not 


104 Napoleon the Little. 


take part in maintaining the constitution of the Republic. 
The army has the upper hand. Now is the moment to com- 
plete the material victory by a moral one; and what a 
government cannot do when it is defeated, it ought to do 
when it is victorious. After having crushed the old parties, 
complete the restoration of the people. Announce that 
universal suffrage, sincere and acting in harmony with the 
greatest liberty, will be established, and that it will appoint 
the President of the Constituent Assembly to save and re- 
store the Republic. It is in the name of the memory of 
my brother, having his horror of civil war, that I write you. 
Trust to my long experience, and consider that France, 
Europe, and posterity will be called to judge your conduct. 
‘‘ Your affectionate Uncle, 
*‘ JEROME BonaPAaRTE.” 

On Madeleine-square, the two representatives, Fabvier 
and Crestin, met and accosted each other. General Fabvier 
drew the attention of his colleague to four pieces of limbered 
cannon which turned bridle, left the Boulevard, and took 
the direction of the Elysée at a gallop. ‘‘Is the Elysée 
already on the defensive?” said the general; and Crestin, 
pointing to the front of the palace of the assembly, on the 
other side of Revolution-square, replied, ‘‘ General, to mor- 
row we shall be there.” From the top of a certain roof 
which overlooked the court-yard of the stables of the Elysée 
might have been seen, since morning, three traveling-carri- 
ages standing harnessed and loaded, with the postilions in 
their saddles, ready to set off. The impulse had actually 
been imparted, the shock of anger and hatred was becoming 
universal, the coup d’état seemed lost. One shock more and 
Louis Bonaparte was overthrown. Let the day end as it haa 


Napoleon the Little. 109 


began, and the tale would have been told. The coup d’état 
touched despair. The hour of supreme resolution had 
come; what are they going todo? It was necessary to strike 
a great blow; an unexpected blow, a frightful one. The 
situation was reduced to this—to perish, or to save one’s 
self frightfully. Louis Bonaparte had not left the Elysée. 
He kept himself in an office on the ground-floor in the 
neighborhood of that splendid gilt saloon, where, a child 
in 1815, he had assisted at the second abdication of Napo- 
leon. He was there, alone; the order was given to allow 
no one to be admitted to him. From time to time the door 
was Set ajar, and the gray head of General Roguet, his aid- 
de-camp, appeared. General Roquet was the only person 
permitted to open that door and enter. The general kept 
bringing news more and more disturbing, and entered 
frequently with these words : “The thing is not working,” or 
“ the thing goes badly.” When he had finished, Louis Bona- 
parte, who was leaning with his elbow upon a table, resting 
his feet on the andirons before a large fire, half turned 
his head upon the back of his arm-chair, and in a tone of 
voice the most phlegmatic, and without visible emotion, 
invariably answered these five words : “‘ Let them execute my 
orders.”’ The last time General Roguet entered with bad 
news in this way, it was near one o'clock. He himself has 
subsequently related these details to the honor of the im- 
passibility of his master. He says he informed the prince that 
the barricades in the central streets held their own and were 
multiplying; that on the Boulevards the cries : ‘ Down with 
the dictator,” (he did not dare to say, down with Soulouque) 
and the hisses resounded everywhere, whenever troops 
went by; that before the Galerie Jouffroy, an adjutant-ma- 


5* 


106 | Napoleon the Little. 


jor had been chased by the mob ; and that at the corner of 
the Café Cardinal a captain of the staff had been torn from 
his horse. Louis Bonaparte half rose from his arm-chair 
and calmiy said, while he looked at the general, fixedly: 
“« Well, let them tell St. Arnaud to execute my orders.” 

What were those orders ? 

You are going to see. 

Here we recoil, and the narrator puts his pen to the sheet 
with a sort of hesitation and anguish. We have come up 
with that sudden and abominable change of this dismal 
day of the fourth ; that monstrous deed, out of which the suc- 
cess of the coup d'état issued, all covered with blood. We 
are about to unveil the most sinister of the plans of Louis 
Bonaparte ; we are going to reveal in detail what the his- 
torians of the 2d of December have concealed ; what Gen- 
eral Magnan has carefully omitted from his report; what 
in Paris itself, where the things were seen, one dares scarcely 
whisper in the ear. We enter the horrible. The 2d of 
December is a crime covered with night ; a coffin closed 
and silent, from the crevices of which there come out 
streams of blood. We are going to open this coffin. 


C HyACP Ae Eas Je 


Since morning—for here let us insist on this point, pre- 
meditation cannot be denied—since morning strange post- 
bills had been posted on all the corners of the streets. We 
have transcribed them; people remember them. Since 
the cannon of the Revolution thundered sixty years ago 
on certain days in Paris, when now and then it occa- 
sionally happened that the threatened authorities recurred 
to desperate resources, nothing equal to it had been 
seen. These notices announced to the citizens that all 
crowds of any kind whatsoever would be dispersed by force, 
without summons. In Paris, the central city of civilization, 
one hardly believes that a man can go to the extreme of 
crime; and the public only saw in these notices a hideous 
and savage and almost ridiculous means of intimidation. 

They were mistaken. These notices contained in germ 
the plan of Louis Bonaparte. They were serious. A word 
on what is going to be the theater of the unheard act, pre- 
pared and perpetrated by the man of December. From the 
Madeleine to the Faubourg Poissonniére the Boulevard was 
clear; from the theater of the Gymnasium to the theater of 
the Port St. Martin it was barricaded, as well as Bondy- 
street, Meslay-street, La Lune-street, and all the streets 
which border on or come out at the St. Denis and St. Mar- 
tin gates. On the other side of the St. Martin gate the 
Boulevard became again free, up to the Bastille, near 
which a barricade had been thrown up as high as the 


\ 


108 Napoleon the Little. 


Chateau d’Eau. Between the two gates, St. Denis and St. 
Martin, seven or eight redoubts cut the pavement from 
point to point. A square of four barricades enclosed St. 
Martin’s gate. That one which faced the Madeleine, and 
which was to be the first to receive the shock of the troops, 
was constructed at the culminating point of the Boulevard, 
the left resting upon the angle of La Lune-street, and the 
right on Mazagnan-street. four omnibuses, five furniture 
wagons, the desk of the inspector of hacks upset, the de- 
molished Vespasian columns, the benches of the Boulevard, 
the flag-stones of the staircase of La Lune-street, the iron 
balustrade of the sidewalk torn off entire, and with one 
effort, by the formidable grip of the multitude — these 
formed the heap which was scarcely enough to bar the 
Boulevard, which was too wide in this place. There were 
no paving-stones, for the street was macadamized. The 
barricade did not even reach from one kirb of the Boule- 
vard to the other, and left a wide space open on the side of 
Mazagnan-street. There was a house in course of erec- 
tion at this spot. Seeing this gap, a young man, well 
dressed, mounted the scaffold, and alone, and quietly, and 
without taking his cigar out of his mouth, cut all its cords. 
From the neighboring windows they applauded him with 
laughter. A moment afterward the scaffold fell with a 
great crash, and in one mass, and this completed the 
barricade. 

While this redoubt was in course of construction, a score 
of men entered the Gymnasium by the Actors’ gate, and 
came out a few moments afterward with guns and a drum 
which they had found in the store-room of costumes, and 
which made part of what they call in the language of 


Napoleon the Little. 109 


theaters, “the accessories.” One of them took the drum 
and began to beat the roll-call ; the others, with the Ves- 
pasian columns which had been thrown down, with 
carriages which had been laid on their sides, with Vene- 
tian blinds and shutters unhooked from their hinges, 
and with old scenery of the theater, built as high as 
the Bonne-Nouvelle station—a little advanced barricade, 
or rather a lunette, which looked out toward the Boule- 
vards Poissonniére and Montmartre and Hauteville-street. 
The troops had since morning evacuated the guard-house. 
They took the flag of the guard-house and planted it on 
the barricade. That is the flag which has since been de- 
clared by the journals of the coup d’état the red flag. Fifteen 
men or so installed themselves in this advanced post. 
They had guns, but few or no cartridges. Behind them 
the grand barricade, which covered the St. Denis gate, was 
occupied by a hundred combatants, in the midst of which 
you might have remarked two women, and an old man 
with white locks, supporting himself with a cane which he 
held in his left hand, while he held a gun in his right. 
One of the two women carried a saber, slung over her 
shoulders. In helping to tear off the balustrade of the 
sidewalk she had cut off three of her fingers in the angle of 
a bent barofiron. Slge held up her mutilated hand to the 
crowd, and cried out, ‘‘ Vive la République!” The other 
woman mounted on the top of the barricade, and leant on 
the staff of the flag, escorted by two men in blouses, armed 
with guns, and presenting arms, and read in a high voice 
the call of the representatives and of the left to arms; the 
people applauded. All this happened between noon and 
one o'clock, An immense population on this side of the - 


ie: Napoleon the Little. 


barricaded streets covered the pavements on both sides of the 
Boulevard—silent at some points, at others crying, “ Down 
with Soulouque ! Down with the traitor !” 

At intervals lugubrious processions crossed this multi- 
tude. They were files of hand-barrows carried by hospital 
attendants and soldiers. At their head marched men 
holding long staves, from which hung blue pennants, on 
which were written in great letters, ‘‘ Service of the military 
hospitals.” On the screens of the barrows you read: The 
wounded: Ambulances. The weather was somber and 
rainy. At this moment a crowd collected at the Bourse. 
The porters were pasting there on all the walls dispatches 
announcing the adhesion of the departments to the coup 
d'état. The Exchange agents, all pushing fora rise, laughed 
and shrugged their shoulders before these placards. 

All of a sudden a well-known speculator, and a man who 
had greatly applauded the coup d’état for two days past, 
came up all pale and gasping, like a man who was flying 
for his life, and said, ‘‘ They are sweeping the Boulevards 
with grape-shot!” This is what was taking place. 


Crear TER > Fer 


A LITTLE after one o'clock, a quarter of an hour after the 
last order given by Louis Bonaparte to General Roguet, 
the Boulevards throughout their entire length from the 
Madeleine, were suddenly covered with cavalry and infantry. 
The Carrelet division, nearly entire, composed of the five 
brigades of Cotte, Bourgon, Canrobert, Dulac, and Reybell, 
and presenting an effective force-of sixteen thousand four 
hundred and ten men, had taken position, and were placed 
in échelon from the Rue de la Paix to the Faubourg Pois- 
sonniére. Each brigade had its battery with it. One could 
count on the Boulevard eleven pieces of cannon; two, which 
turned their backs to each other, had been pointed, one at 
the entrance of Mont Martre-street, the other at that of the 
Faubourg Mont Marte. No one could imagine why they 
were so placed, as the street and the Faubourg did not show 
even the sign of a barricade. The curious crowds on the 
sidewalks and at the windows looked on with amazement. 
It was one closely packed mass of gun-carriages, sabers, 
and bayonets. ‘‘The troops were laughing and talking,” 
says a witness. Another witness says ‘‘the soldiers had a 
strange air; the greater part had their gun-stocks on the 
ground, and were leaning on their pieces, and seemed half 
reeling with weariness or something else.’ One of those old 
officers who have had long practice in inspecting troops, 
and had the habit of looking them in the depths of the 
eyes, General L***, said, as he passed before café Frascate, 
“© They are drunk,” 


112 Napoleon the Little. 


-Symptoms were manifesting themselves. At one time, 
when the crowd cried to the troops, Long live the Repub- 
lic, down with Louis Bonaparte, an officer was heard to 
say in a low tone, ‘‘ This will soon turn into the pork- 
butcher’s business.” A battalion of infantry debouched 
by Richelieu-street, before the Cardinal Café ; they were re- 
ceived with a unanimous cry of Vive la République. A 
writer who was there, editor of a conservative journal, 
added also, “‘ A bas, Soulouque!” The staff-officer who 
was leading the detachment, struck at him with his saber ; 
the blow, avoided by the writer, cut one of the shrubs of 
the Boulevard. As the First Lancers, commanded by 
Colonel Rochefort, arrived at the head of Taitbout-street, 
a numerous group covered the composition pavement of 
the Boulevard. They were the residents of the quarter, the 
traders, artists, journalists, and among them a few women 
holding young children by the hand. As the regiment 
passed by, men, women, all cried, ‘‘ Vive la Constitu- 
tion,” ‘‘ Vive la Loi,” ‘‘ Vive la République.” Colonel 
Rochefort, the same who had presided on the 31st October, 
1851, at the banquet given by the First Lancers, at the 
Ecole Militaire, and who in this banquet had pronounced 
this toast, ‘‘To Prince Napoleon, the Chief of the State ; 
he is the impersonation of the order of which we are all 
the defenders.” This colonel, at the perfectly legal cry, 
sent forth by the crowd, dashed his horse into the middle 
of the group, across the chairs of the sidewalk, the lancers 
rushed after him, and men, women, and children, ad/ were 
sabered! ‘‘ A good number of them remained on the spot,” 
says an apologist of the coup d’état, who adds, ‘‘ It was the 


Napoleon the Little. se) 


affair of a moment.”* Toward two o’clock they pointed 
two howitzers at the end of the Boulevard Poissonniére, 
at one hundred and fifty paces from the little barricade- 
lunette of the Bonne-Nouvelle station. In placing their 
pieces in battery, the soldiers of the train, little accustomed, 
however, to false maneuvers, broke the pole of a caisson. 
““You see plainly that “hey are drunk,” cried a man from 
among the people. At half-past two o'clock, for it is 
necessary to follow step by step this hideous drama, the 
fire opened against the barricade gently, and as it were 
without purpose. It seemed as if the military chiefs had 
their minds on anything but a battle. We are going to 
see what they were actually dreaming of. The first cannon- 
shot, badly aimed, passed above- all the barricades and 
almost all the windows. The projectile struck and killed a 
young boy who was pouring out water into a basin ina 
distant house. 

The shops were closed, and almost all the windows. 
One window, however, remained open in the higher story 
of the house which formed the corner of du Sentier-street. 
The curious continued to flock, principally on the south 
sidewalk. It was a crowd and nothing more: men, women, 
children, and old men; for them the barricade, little attacked, 
little defended, had the effect of a sham fight. This barri- 
cade was a play, until it became a pretext. There was about 
a quarter of an hour that the troops fired, and the barricade 
responded, without there being one wounded man on either 
side, when suddenly, as if by an electric shock, an extraordi- 


* Captain Mauduit. Military Revolution of the Second of December, 
page 217. 


114 Napoleon the Little. 


nary and terrible movement took place, first in the infantry, 
then in the cavalry. The troops suddenly changed front. 
The historians of the coup d’état have related that one shot 
directed against the soldiers was fired from the open win- 
dows at the corner of du Sentier-street. Others said from 
the top of the house which formed the corner of Notre 
Dame de Recouvrance and Poissonniére streets. Accord- 
ing to others the shot was a pistol-shot, and was shot from 
the high house which marks the corner of Mazagnan- 
street. This shot is disputed ; but what is not contested is 
that forshaving fired this questioned pistol-shot, which was, 
perhaps, nothing but the violent shutting of a door; a 
dentist residing in the next house was shot. In short, was a 
pistol or gun shot heard-coming from one of the houses on 
the Boulevard ? was it? is it true? is it false? a crowd of 
witnesses deny it. If the pistol-shot was fired, it remains 
to be cleared up whether it was a cause, or whether it was 
a signal. Be that as it may, suddenly, as we have just said, 
the cavalry, the infantry, the artillery, wheeled their front to 
the crowd massed on the sidewalks, and without any one 
being able to divine why, abruptly, without motive, ‘‘ with- 
out summons,” as the infamous postbills had declared in 
the morning, from the Gymnasium to the Chinese baths, 
that is to say, in all the length of the richest Faubourg, 
the most stirring and joyous of Paris, a slaughter com- 
menced. ‘The army set itself to work shooting the people 
at the muzzles of their guns. It was a sinister and inex- 
pressible moment; the cries, the arms raised to heaven, the 
surprise, the terror, the crowd flying in all directions, a 
hail of balls raining up and down from the pavements to 
the roofs, in one minute the dead strewing the pavement ; 


Napoleon the Little. ee) 


young men falling with cigars in their mouths ; women in 
velvet dresses killed stone dead by the iron balls; two 
booksellers musketed on the thresholds of their shops, 
without having known what the matter was ; gun-shots fired 
down the ventholes of cellars, and there killing it made 
no difference whom, the bazar riddled with bullets and 
shell; the Hétel Sollandrouze bombarded ; the Maison 
d’Or covered with grape-shot ; Tortoni taken by assault ; 
the hundreds of corpses; Richelieu-street a stream of 
blood. Let the narrator be here again permitted to inter- 
rupt himself. 

In presence of these nameless facts, I who write these 
lines, I declare, Iam a recorder, I register the crimes, I 
call up the cause, that is all my function ; I cite Louis 
Bonaparte, I cite St. Arnaud, Maupas, Morny, Magnan, 
Carrelet, Canrobert, de Cotte, Reybell, his accomplices, 
I cite still others whose names will be found elsewhere ; I 
cite the executioners, the murderers, the victims, the wit- 
nesses, the warm cannon, the smoking sabers, the drunken- 
ness of the soldiery, the mourning of families, the dying, 
the dead, the horror, the blood, and the tears, to the bar 
of the civilized world. The narrator alone, whoever he 
might be, one would not believe. Let us then give speech 
to living facts, to bloody facts. Let us listen to the wit- 
nesses. 


CHAP AE RR alve 


WE will not print the names of the witnesses ; we have 
said why ; but you will recognize in them the sincere and 
poignant tone of truth. 

One says: ‘‘I had not taken three steps on the pavement 
‘*before the company which were defiling stopped sud- 
‘‘denly, made the right about face, lowered their pieces, 
‘* fired on the distracted crowd with a simultaneous move- 
‘‘ment. The fire continued without interruption during 
‘“twenty minutes; accompanied from time to time bya few 
‘‘cannon-shots. At the first fire I cast myself on the 
‘*sround and dragged myself like a reptile on the pavement 
‘*to the first halfopen door which I could reach. This was 
‘‘the shop of a wine-merchant, situated at No. 180, beside the 
‘Bazaar of Industry. I was the last that entered. The mus- 
‘‘ketry firing continued uninterruptedly. There were in this 
‘‘shop nearly fifty persons, and amongst them five or six 
‘women, and two or three children. Three unfortunate men 
‘‘had entered, wounded ; two died at the end of a quarter 
‘‘ofan hour, in horrible sufferings ; the third was still living 
‘‘when I left the shop, at four o’clock. A few women, two 
‘‘of whom have just bought in the quarter, provisions for 
‘‘their dinner ; a little cryer-clerk, sent on business by his 
‘‘master; two or three habitués of the Exchange ; two or 
‘‘three landlords; a few workmen: few, or none, dressed 
‘in blouses. One of the unhappy refugees in this shop 
‘‘produced a vivid impression on me. He was a man 


Napoleon the Little. 17) 


‘about thirty years old, of light complexion, with a gray 
‘“paletot on. He was returning with his wife to the Fau- 
“‘bourg Montmartre to dine with his family, when he was 
‘“stopped in the Boulevard by the passage of a column of 
‘troops. In the first moment, and at the first discharge, 
“‘he and his wife fell, He rose up, was drawn into the 
‘‘wine-merchant’s shop ; but he no longer had his wife on 
‘*his arm, and his despair cannot be described. He tried 
“with all his strength, and in spite of our representations, 
“‘to get the door open, and run to search for his wife in 
‘the midst of the volleys that swept the street. We had 
‘‘the greatest difficulty in keeping him back for the space 
‘fof an hour. The next day I learned that his wife had 
“been killed, and that the corpse had been recognized at 
‘‘the city Bergére. Fifteen days afterward I learned that _ 
‘‘this unfortunate, having threatened to make M. Bonaparte 
‘‘suffer vengeance, had been arrested and transported to 
‘« Brest, to be sent ultimately to Cayenne. Almost all the 
‘* citizens assembled in the wine-merchant’s shop held mon- 
‘“archical opinions ; and I did not meet among them but 
‘‘one, a former compositor of the Reforme newspaper, of 
‘‘the name of Meuniér, and one of his friends, who avowed 
“‘themselves Republicans. Toward four o'clock I went out 
“of that shop.” 

A witness—one of those who thought he heard the gun- 
shot sent from Mazagnan-street, adds: ‘‘ The gunshot was 
“‘the signal for the troops to direct a continuous fire on 
‘“all the houses and the windows, the rattling of which 
‘‘Jasted at least thirty minutes. It was kept up simultane- 
“ously from the St. Denis gate to the café of_the Grand- 


118 Napoleon the Little. 


“‘Balcon. The cannon soon mingled its roar with the 
“‘musketry.” 

One witness says: ‘‘ At half-past three o’clock a singular 
‘““movement took place. The soldiers, who were facing the 
‘St. Denis gate, effected instantaneously a change of front, 
‘“resting on the houses from the Gymnasium, the house of 
‘‘Pont du Fer, the Hétel Saint-Phar ; and, at the same time, 
““a rolling fire was directed on the houses and on the people 
‘who were on the other side, from St. Denis-street to Riche- 
‘‘lieu-street. A few minutes were enough to cover the 
‘sidewalk with corpses. ‘The houses were riddled with 
‘*balls, and this furious action kept up its paroxysm during 
‘‘three-quarters of an hour.” 

A witness says: ‘‘ The first cannon-shot, directed on the 
‘‘barricade Bonne-Nouvelle, had served as a signal for the 
“‘rest of the troops, who had fired almost at the same time 
‘on all who were found within gunshot.” 

A witness says: ‘‘ Words cannot describe such an act of 
‘barbarism. It is necessary to have been a witness in order 
‘“to venture to relate it, and to give evidence of the truth 
“‘of so indescribable a deed. Musket-shots were fired by 
‘‘thousands—it 1s inappreciable*—by the troops on all the 
‘“inoffensive people, and that without any necessity ; they 
‘* desired to produce a strong impression—that is all.” 

A witness says: ‘‘ When the excitement was very great in 
‘‘the Boulevard, the line, followed by the artillery and cav- 
‘‘alry, arrived. A gunshot was soon fired in the midst of 
‘the company, and it was easy to see that it had been fired 
‘‘in the line by the smoke which arose perpendicularly.” 


* The witness meant to say incalculable, We have desired to avoid 
changing anything in the text. 


Napoleon the Little. 119 


That, therefore, was the signal to fire, ‘‘ without summons 
to disperse,” and to charge bayonets on the people. This 
is significant, and proves that the troops wished to have the 
semblance of a motive for commencing the massacre which 
followed. 

A witness relates: ‘‘ The cannon, charged with grape- 
““shot, hacked the fronts of the houses, from the Magazin 
‘‘du Prophéte to Montmartre-street ; from the Boulevard 
‘‘Bonne-Nouvelle they were to fire also with bullets on 
‘* Billecog-house, for it had been hit at the corner from the 
‘“side of Aubusson, and the bullet, after having pierced the 
‘wall, penetrated to the interior.” 

Another witness—one of those who deny the gunshot— 
says: ‘‘ They have tried to extenuate this fusilade and these 
‘Assassinations by pretending that they had fired on the 
‘troops from a certain house. In addition to the fact that 
‘«General Magnan’s report seems to give the lie to this re- 
‘* port, I affirm that the volleys were instantaneous from the 
“St. Denis gate to the Montmartre gate, and that there 
‘‘had not been, before the general discharge, a single shot 
‘‘fired alone, either from the windows or by the troops, 
‘‘from the Faubourg St. Denis to the Boulevard des 
“ Ttaliens.” 

Another, who did not hear the gunshot any more than 
the other, says : ‘‘ The troops defiled before the staircase of 
‘«Tortoni, where I was, about twenty minutes before ; 
‘when, before any sound of a gunshot reached us, they 
‘moved. The cavalry took a gallop, the infantry the double- 
‘quick ; all of a sudden we saw a fringe of fire come from 
*‘the side of the Boulevard Poissonniére, and extend and 
‘* gain rapidly, the fusilade being begun. I can guarantee 


120 Napoleon the Little. 


‘that no explosion had preceded it, that not a gunshot was 
‘‘sent from the houses between the Café Frascati to the 
‘place where I was standing. At last, we saw the muzzles 
‘of the guns which were before us lower and threaten us. 
‘‘We took refuge in Taitbout-street, under a porte cochére. 
‘“ At the same moment the balls passed above us and around 
‘‘us. A woman was killed within ten paces of me, at the 
““moment when I was hiding myself under the coachway. 
‘‘There was neither barricade there nor insurgents, I can 
‘‘make oath. There were hunters and the game which 
‘“tried to escape them. ‘That was all.” 

That image, ‘‘ hunters and game,” is that which comes 
first to the mind of those who saw the terrible thing. 

We shall find the image again in the words of another 
witness : — 3 

“The gendarmes were seen at the foot of my street, and I 
“know that there were some likewise in the neighborhood, 
“ holding their guns, and holding themselves in the attitude 
“of hunters who were waiting for the rising of the game, that 
“is to say, with the gun near the shoulder, so as to be more 
‘‘prompt in placing and firing it. Also, in order to lavish 
“the best care to the wounded who should fall in Mont- 
“‘ martre-street, near the gates, one saw from point to point 
“doors open, and an arm shoot out and draw in the corpse 
“or the dying, whom the balls still contended for.” 

Another witness again uses the same image: ‘‘The 
“soldiers in ambuscade at the corner of the streets were 
‘waiting for the citizens who should pass, as hunters lie in 
“wait for their game, and as soon as they saw them occupied 
‘in the street, they fired on them as on bulls’ eyes in a tar- 
“get. Numbers of citizens were killed in this manner in 


Napoleon the Little. 121 


“Du Sentier and Rougemont streets, and the Faubourg 
“Poissonniére.. . . . ‘Go off!’ said the officers to the 
*‘ inoffensive citizens who asked protection from them. At 
“this order the latter drew off quietly and with confidence ; 
“but it was only a word of command which meant death, 
“‘and, actually, scarcely had they taken a few steps before 
“they fell.” 

‘* At the moment when the fire commenced on the Bou- 
‘‘levards,” says another witness, ‘‘a bookseller in the 
‘‘neighborhood of the carpet-house was hastening to close 
‘‘his front, when the fugitives, trying to enter, were sus- 
“*pected by the troops, or the gendarmes, I don’t know 
‘‘which, of having fired on them. The troops broke into 
‘*the bookseller’s house. The latter desired to make 
‘some explanation. He was alone before his own door, 
*‘and his wife and daughter had only time to cast them- 
“selves between him and the soldiers before he fell dead. 
‘The wife received a ball through the thigh, and the 
‘* daughter was saved by the busk of her corset.” 

Another witness says: ‘‘The soldiers entered the two 
‘*bookstores which are before the Maison du Prophéte 
‘‘and that of M. Sallandrouze. Murders are averred to 
‘‘have taken place. They cut the two booksellers’ throats 
‘‘on the sidewalks ; the other prisoners were slaughtered 
‘*in the house.” Let us end with these extracts, which one 
cannot transcribe without shuddering. 

‘*In the first quarter of an hour of this horror,” says a 
witness, ‘‘the fire, for a moment less active, made a few 
‘“ citizens who were only wounded believe that they could 
‘rise. Amongst the men lying before the Prophéte two 


‘‘rose up. One took to flight toward Du Sentier-street, 
6 


122 Napoleon the Little. 


‘from which a few yards only separated him. He then 
““came in the midst of balls, which carried away his cap. 
‘*The second could only place himself on his knees, and 
‘‘with joined hands beg the soldiers to spare him ; but he 
‘*fell instantly, shot. The next day one could see beside 
‘‘the staircase du Prophéte a space scarcely more than a 
“‘few feet in diameter where more than a hundred balls 
**had struck.” 

Another says: ‘‘ At the entrance of Montmartre-street 
‘‘up to the fountain, a space of about sixty paces, there 
‘‘were sixty corpses—-men, women, ladies, children, 
“‘young girls. All these unfortunates had fallen victims 
‘of the first shots fired by the troops and the gendarmes, 
‘‘placed facing them on the opposite side of the Boule- 
‘‘vard. All those who fled at the first report took a few 
‘more steps, then at last fell to rise no more. A young 
*‘man was seeking refuge in the frame of a closed coach- 
‘way, and was sheltering himself under the projection of 
**the wall at the side of the Boulevards. He served for a 
‘target to the soldiers. After ten minutes of unsuccessful 
‘‘shooting he was hit, in spite of all his efforts to make 
‘himself thinner by stretching himself up; and they saw 
‘him fall to rise no more.” 

Another: ‘‘ The glasses and the windows of the Maison 
“du Pont de Fer were broken. A man in the courtyard 
*‘became crazy from terror. The cellars were full of women 
‘‘who had taken refuge there uselessly. The soldiers fired 
“‘mto the shops and down the ventholes of the cellars. 
‘‘From Tortoni to the Gymnase it was like that. It lasted 
**more than an hour.” 


CED A. Pe eve 


Let us stop these extracts here, and close this mournful 
appeal. It is enough for proofs. The accursed character of 
the deed is apparent. One hundred other sheets of evi- 
dence, which we have here before our eyes, repeat almost 
the same facts in almost the same words. It is certain, 
from henceforth it is proved, it is without doubt and with- 
out question, It is as visible as the sun, that on Thurs- 
day, the 4th of December, 1851, the inoffensive people of 
Paris, the population not mingled with the riot, were 
mowed down with grape-shot, without summons, and 
massacred for the simple purpose of intimidation, and that 
there is no other sense to give to the mysterious words of 
M. Bonaparte, ‘‘Let them execute my orders.” This 
execution lasted till nightfall. During more than an hour 
there was on the Boulevard an orgy of musketry and artil- 
lery. ‘The cannonade and the pelting of balls crossed each 
other at hazard. At one particular moment the soldiers 
killed each other. The battery of the 6th regiment of 
artillery, which formed part of the brigade Canrobert, was 
dismounted ; the horses rearing in the midst of the balls 
broke the fore carriages, the wheels and the poles of the 
whole battery; in less than a minute, there remained but 
one piece that could roll. An entire squadron of the First 
Lancers was obliged to take refuge in a shed in St. Fidcree 
street. They counted the next day seventy bullet-holes in 
the pennants of the lances. 


124 Napoleon the Little. 


Madness had seized the soldiers. At the corner of 
Rougemont-street, in the midst of the smoke, a general 
threw up his arms as if to restrain them. A surgeon aide- 
major of the 27th just escaped being killed by soldiers 
whom he was trying to moderate. A sergeant said to an 
officer who arrested his arm, ‘‘ Lieutenant, you are com- 
mitting treason.” ‘The soldiers had no longer any self-pos- 
session. ‘They were as if made insane by the crime which 
they had been made to commit. There comes a moment 
when the very abomination of what we do makes us re- 
double our blows. Blood is a sort of horrible wine; 
slaughter makes one drunk. It seemed as if a blind hand 
were launching death from the depth of a cloud. The 
soldiers were nothing more than projectiles. Two pieces 
were pointed from the pavement of the Boulevard on a 
single house-front, that of the Sallandrouze warehouse, 
and fired on the front to the death, in full volley, at a few 
paces distance. This house, an old hotel, built of free- 
stone, and remarkable for its almost monumental staircase, 
split by the bullets as if by wedges of iron, opened and 
cracked from top to bottom. ‘The soldiers redoubled their 
efforts. At each discharge a crack was heard. Suddenly an 
artillery officer arrived at a gallop and cried, ‘‘Stop! stop! 
the house is leaning forward, a bullet more and it will 
fall on the cannons and the cannoneers.” The cannoneers 
were so drunk that, no longer knowing what they did, several 
allowed themselves to be killed by the recoil of the guns. 
Balls came at the same time from the St. Denis gate, from 
the Boulevard Poissonniére, and from the Boulevard Mont- 
martre. ‘The artillerymen, who heard them whistle on all 
sides, lay down on their horses. The men on the carriages 


Napoleon the Little. 125 


took refuge under the caissons and behind the wagons, 
One saw soldiers in Notre Dame de Réconasance-street 
letting their képi fall and fly distracted. The dragoons, 
losing their selfcommand, fired their carbines in the air ; 
others dismounted and took shelter behind their horses, 
Three or four loose horses galloped back and forth wild 
with terror. Frightful jests mingled with the slaughter. 
The skirmishers of Vincennes were established on one of 
the barricades of the Boulevard, which they had taken at 
the point of the bayonet. There they were practicing as at 
a mark on distant passers-by. They heard from the neighbor- 
ing houses these hideous dialogues: ‘‘I lay a wager that I 
drop that fellow.” ‘‘I say no ;” ‘‘I say yes,” and the shot 
sped on its way. If the man fell, it was announced by a 
loud shout of laughter. When a woman was passing by, 
‘* Fire at the woman !” cried the officer, ‘‘ fire at women !” 
That was one of the words of command. On the Boule- 
vard Montmartre a young captain of the staff cried, ‘‘ Prick 
the women!” A woman thought she could cross St. 
Fidcre-street. She had a loaf of bread under herarm. A 
skirmisher brought her down. 

On Jean-Jacques-Rousseau-street they did not go to 
those lengths. A woman cried, ‘‘ Vive la République !” 
She was only lashed by the soldiers. But let us return to 
the Boulevard. A passer-by, an usher, was hit in the fore- 
head. He fell on his hands and knees, crying ‘‘ Mercy !” 
He received thirteen other balls in the body. He sur- 
vived. Byan unheard-of accident no wound proved mortal. 
The ball in the forehead had ploughed through the skin, 
and gone around the skull without piercing it. An old 
man of eighty-five years of age, found squatting somewhere 


126 Napoleon the Little. 


or other, was taken before the staircase of the Prophéte 
and shot. He fell. ‘‘He will not give himself a bump 
on the head,” said a soldier. The old man had fallen on 
a heap of corpses. Two young men of Issy, married a 
month before, and who had married two sisters, were 
crossing the Boulevard coming from their business. They 
saw themselves aimed at. They threw themselves on their 
knees, and cried, ‘‘ We have married two sisters!” They 
were killed. A cocoa-seller, named Robert, and living at 
No. 97, Faubourg Poissonniére, was flying down Mont- 
martre-street, with his fountain on his back. They killed 
him.* A child, thirteen years old, a saddler’s apprentice, 
was passing on the Boulevard before the Vachette coffee- 
house. They took aim at him. He uttered desperate 
cries. He was holding in his hand a bridle. He waved 
it, saying, ‘‘I am going on an errand.” They killed him. 
Three balls bored through his breast. All the length of 
the Boulevard one heard the howling and the movements 
of agony made by the wounded, whom the soldiers covered 
with bayonet-wounds, and left without even dispatching. 
A few bandits took the time to steal. A cashier of 
a company, whose office was in Bank-street, left his office 
at two o’clock ; went to Bergére-street to cash a check ; 





* One can name the person who saw this deed. He is proscribed. It 
was Versigny, a representative. He says: ‘I see yet, at the head of Du 
Croissant-street, an unfortunate coffee-house keeper, walking along, with 
his fountain of white iron on his back, He staggered, then sank, bending 
down, and fell dead against the front of ashop. He alone, his only arms 
being his bell, had had the honor of a volley.” The same witness adds: 
“The soldiers swept with gunshot places where no paving-stone had 
been touched, and where there was no combatant,” 


Napoleon the Little. 127 


was returning with the money when he was killed on the 
Boulevard. When they raised the body it had on it neither 
purse nor watch, nor the sum of money which he had 
been carrying back. Under the pretext of gunshots fired 
on the troops, they entered ten or twelve houses, here and 
there, and put to the bayonet all whom they found in them. 
There are on all the houses of the Boulevard iron waste- 
pipes, by which the refuse-water is emptied into the stream. 
The soldiers, without knowing why, held every house 
which was shut up from top to bottom, and silent and 
gloomy, to be uttering defiance, for, like all the houses of 
the Boulevard, they seemed inhabited, though silent. They 
knocked at the doors, which opened. They entered. A 
moment afterward a red and smoking wave might have 
been seen coming out of the mouths of the waste-pipes. 
It was blood. A captain, with his eyes starting out of his 
head, cried to the soldiers: ‘‘ No quarter!” A chief of 
battalion shrieked: ‘‘ Enter the houses and kill all !” 

You might have heard the sergeants say—‘‘ Hit the 
bédouins, steady on the bédouins!” ‘‘ From the time of 
the uncle, relates a witness, ‘‘ the soldiers called the citizens 
péekins; really we are bédouins. When the soldiers 
massacre the people, it is a cry of—mnow then, down on the 
bédouins.” At the circle of Frascati, where several habitués, 
among others an old general, were assembled, they heard 
this thunder of musketry and cannonade, and they could 
not believe that they were firing with ball. They laughed 
and said—‘‘It is only blank cartridge! What a get-up! 
What a comedian that Bonaparte is!” They believed 
themselves at the circus. Suddenly the soldiers entered 
furious, and wanted to kill everybody. They did not have 


128 Napoleon the Little. 


sufficient misgiving of the danger to run; they kept on 
laughing. One witness says, “ We thought that this made 
part of the farce.” However, the soldiers kept threatening. 
At last they understood. ‘‘Zet us hill all,” said they. A 
lieutenant who knew the old general kept them from it. 
Yet a sergeant said: ‘‘ Lzeutenant, let us be, it ws not your 
business, tt 1s ours.” The soldiers killed for the sake of kill- 
ing. A witness says they killed even the horses and dogs 
in the courtyards of houses. 

In the house which formed with that of Frascati the 
corner of Richelieu-street, they wanted tranquilly to kill 
even the women and children; they were already heaped 
together for it in front of a platoon, when a colonel 
came up. He suspended the murder, penned up these poor 
trembling creatures in the Passage of Panoramas, had the 
gratings of it shut, and saved them. A distinguished writer, 
M. Lireux, having escaped the first balls, was led about 
during two hours from guard-house to guard-house, to be 
shot. It took miracles to save him. The celebrated artist, 
Sax, who happened to be in the music-store of Brandus, 
was going to be shot there, when a general recognized him. 
Everywhere in other places they were killing at hazard. 

The first man who was killed in this butchery (history 
also preserves the name of the first massacred on St. 
Bartholomew’s day) was called Theodore Debaecque, and 
lived in the house on the corner of Du Sentier-street, near 
which the carnage commenced. 


CHART HRV PE 


Tue slaughter ended,—that is to say, the night having 
set in,—they had commenced in full day,—they did not 
raise the corpses ; they were so packed, that before a single 
shop—that of Barbedienne—they counted thirty-three of 
them. 

Every square of earth, cut in round the trunks of the 
trees on the Boulevard, was a reservoir of blood. ‘‘The 
‘‘dead,” says another witness, ‘‘ were crowded in heaps, 
‘*one on top of another; old men, children, blouses, and 
‘‘paletots, together in an indescribable pell-mell, with 
‘‘heads, arms, legs, mixed together.” Another witness, 
who describes a group of three persons, ‘‘ two were thrown 
‘*down on their backs; a third, being caught in their legs, 
‘*had fallen on them.” Separate corpses were rare ; people 
remarked them more than the others. A young man, well 
dressed, was seated with his back to the wall, with his legs 
“apart, and his arms half crossed ; he had a sprig of green 
in his right hand, and seemed to be looking at it. He was 
dead. 

A little further on the balls had nailed against a shop a 
youth in pantaloons of cotton velvet, who was holding in 
his hand proofs from the press. ‘The wind moved these 
bloody leaves on which the wrist of death was contracted. 
A poor old man, with white hair, was stretched in the mid- 
dle of the street, with his umbrella beside him. He al- 
most touched the elbow of a young man in varnished boots 


130 Napoleon the Little. 


and yellow gloves, who was lying with his eye-glass yet in 
his eye. Ata few paces from him was lying, with her head 
on the sidewalk and her feet on the pavement, a woman 
who had been flying, with her child in her arms. The 
mother and the child were dead, but the mother had not let 
go the child. Ah! you will tell me, M. Bonaparte, that 
you are very sorry for it, but that it was an accident; that 
in presence of Paris almost risen it was necessary to do 
something ; that you had been forced to do it, since it was 
necessary ; and that as to the coup d’état, you had debts, 
and your ministers had debts, and your aid-de-camps, and 
your foot-servants, and that you were responsible for all; 
that one is not prince, —what, the devil !—not to consume 
from time to time a few millions too much ; that it is very 
necessary to amuse one’s self and enjoy life; and that it 
was the fault of the Assembly, who did not understand mat- 
ters, and who wished to condemn you to something like 
two meager millions a year, and what is more, to force you 
to go out of power at the end of four years, and to carry 
out the Constitution ; that, above all, one could not go out 
of the Elysée to enter Clichy ; that you had in vain had re- 
course to the little expedients foreseen by the 405th article ; 
that scandals were approaching, and the demagogue press 
were prating that the affair about the ingots of gold was 
going to make a noise; that you owed respect to the name 
of Napoleon, and that, faith! having no other choice, rather 
than be one of the vulgar swindlers of the code, you have 
preferred to be one of the great assassins of history. 

Then instead of defiling you, this blood has washed you 
elean! Very well. I continue. 


CHA P-TER, -VULet 


WHEN it was finished, Paris came to see; the crowd 
flowed in upon these terrible places ; they let them go 
where they pleased. It was the object of the slaughterers. 
Louis Bonaparte did not do this thing to hide it. The 
south side of the Boulevard was covered with the paper of 
torn cartridges. The sidewalk on the north side had dis- 
appeared under the plaster dug by the balls from the fronts 
of the houses, and was all white, as if it had snowed ; the 
pools of blood made large blackish spots in this snow of 
ruins. The foot only avoided a corpse to encounter the 
splinters of glass, plaster, and stones. Certain houses were 
so crushed in with grape-shot and bullets, that they seemed 
to sink ; among others the Sallandrouze house, of which 
we have spoken, and the mourning-store at the corner of 
the Faubourg Montmartre. ‘‘ Billecog-house,” says a wit- 
ness, ‘‘is still to-day propped by strong sticks of timber, 
‘and the front will be in part rebuilt. The carpet-house 
‘*is shot through and through, so as to let in the daylight in 
*“ several places.” Another witness says, ‘‘ All the houses, 
‘from the Circle of Strangers to Poissonniére-street, are 
“literally riddled with bullets, on the right side of the 
** Boulevard throughout. One of the great windows of 
‘“‘the La Petite Jeannette warehouse had alone received 
‘certainly more than two hundred of them. There was 
*“not a window which did not have some; one breathed 
*‘an atmosphere of saltpetre. Thirty-seven corpses were 


132 Napoleon the Little. 


‘*heaped in the city Bergére, the passers-by could count 
‘*them through the grating. A woman had stopped at the 
‘*corner of Richelieu-street, she was looking on ; suddenly 
“*she perceived that she had her feet wet, ‘I declare,’ said 
‘she, ‘it has been raining a good deal ; my feet are in the 
‘*water.’ ‘No, Madame,’a passer-by said to her, ‘it is not 
‘‘water.’ She had her feet in a pool of blood.” 

In Grange-Bateliére-street, three corpses entirely naked 
might have been seen ina corner. During the killing, 
the barricade of the Boulevard had been taken away by the 
Bourgon brigade. The corpses of the defenders of the 
barricade of the Saint Denis gate, of which we spoke 
when we began this recital, were crowded before the gate of 
the Jouvin-house. ‘‘ But,” says a witness, ‘‘it was nothing 
compared with the heaps which covered the Boulevard.” 
Two steps from the theater of the Varieties, the crowd 
stopped before a cap, full of brains and blood, hung up 
on the branch of a tree. A witness says: ‘‘A little beyond 
“the Variétés, I came upon a corpse, with the face toward 
‘“the ground ; I wished to lift it up, helped by a few per- 
» “sons; some soldiers prevented us. A little farther there 
‘“were two bodies, a man and a woman, and then a single 
‘‘one, a workman, * * * * (we abridge). From Mont- 
**martre-street to Du Sentier-street one erally walked in 
‘‘dlod ; it covered the sidewalks in many places, to the 
‘‘depth of several lines, and without hyperbole, without 
‘“exaggeration, precautions were necessary in order not to 
““step into it; I counted there thirty-three corpses. This 
**sight was too much for my strength, I felt great tears 
‘* furrow my cheeks. I asked to cross the street to enter my 
‘*house, which was accorded to me.” A witness says: ‘‘The 


Napoleon the Little. 133 


‘*aspect of the Boulevard was horrible; we /iterally walked 
‘*in blood. We counted eighteen corpses within a length 
‘*of twenty-five paces.” A witness, a shopkeeper of Du Sen- 
tier-street, says: ‘‘I made the tour from the Boulevard 
‘*du Temple to my house; I entered with an inch of 
**blood on my pantaloons.” The representative Versiquy 
relates, ‘‘We perceived at a distance, near the St. Denis 
** gate, the immense bivouac fires of the troops; these 
*“were, with a few scattered lamps, the only light which 
“* permitted one to find his way in the midst of this fright- 
‘*ful carnage. The battle of the day was nothing beside 
“*these corpses, and this silence. R. and I were utterly 
crushed.” A citizen came passing along; at one of my 
exclamations he approached, took me by the hand and said, 
**You are a Republican, I was what they call a friend of 
‘forder, a reactionary ; but a man would be abandoned 
‘*by God, not to abhor this terrible orgy. France is dis- 
‘‘honored! And he quitted us sobbing.” A witness, 
who permits us to name him, a Legitimist, the honorable 
M. de Cherville, declares: ‘‘In the evening I wished to 
““recommence these sad investigations; I met in Lepel- 
*‘ Jetier-street Messrs. Bouillon and Gervais, (from Caen ;) 
‘“we took several steps together, and I slipped; I caught 
“myself by Mr. Bouillon ; I looked at my feet, I had trod 
““into a large pool of blood. Then M. Bouillon 
“‘narrated to me, that in the morning, when he was at 
‘‘his window, he had seen an apothecary, whose shop 
““he showed me, occupied in shutting up its door, A 
‘woman fell. The apothecary rushed out to lift her 
‘up; at the same instant, a soldier took aim at him, 
*‘at ten paces, and struck him down with a ball through 


134 Napoleon the Little. 


‘‘his head. M. Bouillon, indignant and forgetting his own 
‘* danger, cried to the people who stood there: ‘ You will 
‘* give evidence, all of you, as to what has just happened.*” 

Toward eleven o'clock, when the bivouacs were lighted 
throughout, M. Bonaparte permitted them to amuse them- 
selves. There was on the Boulevard a sort of night fete. 
The soldiers laughed and sang, while they kept up the 
fires. with the débris of the barricade ; and then, as at Stras- 
bourg and Boulogne, came the distribution of money. Let 
us listen to what a witness says: ‘‘I saw at the St. Denis 
““ gate, an officer of the staff deliver two hundred francs to 
**the chief of a detachment of twenty men, saying to him, 
‘‘<The prince has charged me to deliver this money to 
‘‘you, to be distributed to your brave soldiers ; and he 
** will not confine the proofs of his satisfaction to this.’ 
‘$ Each soldier received ten francs.” On the evening of 
Austerlitz the Emperor said: ‘‘Soldiers, I am_ satisfied 
‘‘with you!” Another adds: ‘‘The soldiers, with cigars 
‘‘in their mouths, bantered the passers-by, jingling the 
‘money which they had in their pockets.”” Another says: 
‘« The officers broke the rouleaux of Louis like sticks of 
“‘chocolate.” The sentinels only permitted women to 
pass; if a man presented himself, they cried to him: 
““Off.” The tables were set in the bivouacs ; officers and 
soldiers were drinking there. The flames of the quick 
clear fires were reflected on all their joyous countenances. 
The corks and white tops of the champagne bottles swam 
in the gutters, which were red with blood. From bivouac 
to bivouac, they were calling each other with loud shouts, 
and obscene jokes. They hailed each other with Vive les 
gens-d’armes ! long live the lancers! and all added : Long 


Napoleon the Little. 135 
rs 


live Louis Napoleon! One heard the clashing of glasses 
and the sound of breaking bottles.—Here and there, in 
the shade, with a yellow wax candle or a lantern in their 
hands, women were roaming among the corpses, looking 
at the pale faces one after another, this one trying to find 
her son, that one her father, a third her husband. 


CHAPTER» ix 


Let us get through these frightful details at once. 

The day following, the fifth, at the Montmartre ceme- 
tery, a shocking object could be seen. A vast space which 
had remained vacant till this day, was ‘‘made useful” for 
the temporary burial of a few of the slaughtered. They 
were buried with their heads out of the ground so that their 
families might recognize them. The greater part with the 
feet out also, and they had only a little earth on their breasts. 
The crowd came there ; the flow of the curious pushed you 
on; you wandered among graves ; every moment you felt 
the earth bend in under your feet; you had trodden on the 
stomach of a corpse. You turned around, you saw boots, 
wooden shoes, women’s buskins, come out of the earth ; 
on the other side of you was the head that your pressure on 
the body had made start up. 

An illustrious witness, the great statuary David, to-day 
proscribed and a wanderer outside of France, says: ‘‘I 
‘saw at the Montmartre cemetery forty corpses with their 
**clothes still on ; they had placed them side by side ; a few 
‘*shovelfuls of earth hid them up to the head, which they 
‘*had left exposed so that their relations might recognize 
‘‘them. There was so little earth that one saw the feet still 
‘“uncovered, and the public walked om these bodies ; it was 
‘‘horrible! There were noble heads of young men there, 
‘*bearing the stamp of courage; in the midst was a poor 
‘“woman, the servant of a baker, who had been killed 


Napoleon the Little. 137 


‘“carrying bread to the customers of her master, and beside 
‘*her a beautiful young girl who had sold flowers on the 
‘* Boulevard. Those who were looking for persons who had 
‘* disappeared were obliged to trample on the feet of bodies 
““so that they might get a view of their faces. I hearda 
‘common man say, with an expression of horror: One 
**walks as if he were walking on a spring-board.” 

The crowd continued to collect at the different places 
where victims had been deposited, especially the city 
Bergére, so much so that the same day, the fifth, as the 
multitude increased and became troublesome, and it was 
necessary to keep off the curious, one could read on a 
great bill at the entrance these words, in capital letters : 
There are no more corpses here. , 

The three naked corpses of Grange Bateliére-street were 
not taken away till the evening of the fifth, You plainly 
saw, we emphasize it, that at first; and for the capital 
which it hoped to make out of it, the coup d’état did not try 
the least in the world to hide its crime; shame did not 
come to it till later; on the contrary, the first day they made 
a display of it. Atrocity did not satisfy, cynical audacity 
was necessary. To slaughter was only the means, to terrify 
was the end. 


CHAPTER X% 


Was this object attained? Yes. Immediately, from the 
evening of the 4th of December, the effervescence of 
public feeling ceased, stupor froze Paris, The indignation 
which raised its voice before the coup d’état became sud- 
denly mute in the presence of the carnage. This no longer 
resembled history. One feels as if one was dealing with the 
unknown. 

Crassus crushed the gladiators; Herod cut the chil- 
dren’s throats ;* Charles the Ninth exterminated the Hugue- 
nots; Peter of Russia the Strélitz ; Mahomet-Ali the Mame- 
lukes; Mahmoud the Janezaries; Danton massacred the 
prisoners. Louis Bonaparte has invented a new mode of 
slaughter, the massacre of passers-by. 

It ended the struggle. There are hours when that which 
ought to exasperate the people fills them with consterna- 
tion. The population of Paris felt that it had the foot of a 
bandit on its back. They struggled nolonger. This same 
evening, Mathieu (from la Drdme) entered the place where 
the committee of resistance were in session, and said to 
us:—‘“‘ We are no longer at Paris, we are no longer the 
Republic ; we are at Naples, and in the house of King 
Bomba.” From this moment, notwithstanding the efforts of 
the committee of the Republican representatives and their 
courageous helpers, there was further resistance at a few 
points only, for example, at the barricade of the Petit- 
Carreau, where Denis Dussoubs, the brother of the repre- 


Napoleon the Little. E39 


sentative, fell so heroically ; but it was a resistance which 
was less a struggle than the last convulsions of despair. 
All was over. 

The next day, the fifth, the victorious troops were 
parading on the Boulevards. One saw a general show his 
naked saber to the people and cry: ‘‘The Republic? there 
it is!’ Thus an infamous butchery, the massacre of passers- 
by, was what the ‘‘ measure” of the 2d of December in- 
volved as a supreme necessity. To undertake it, it was 
necessary to be a traitor; to make it succeed, it was neces- 
sary to be a murderer. It was by this proceeding that the 
coup d’état conquered Franceand Paris! Yes, Paris! One 
has to repeat it to himself It is at Parzs that this thing 
took place! Great God! the baskirs entered Paris with the 
lance lifted and singing their savage chant, Moscow had 
been burned ; the Prussians entered Paris, they had taken 
Berlin ; the Austrians entered Paris, they had bombarded 
Vienna ; the English entered Paris, the camp of Boulogne 
had menaced London; they arrived at our boundaries, 
these men of all nations, with drums beating, with clarions 
in front, with flags displayed, with sabers drawn, cannon 
Tolling, matches lighted, drunk, enemies, conquerors, 
avengers, shouting with fury before the domes of Paris 
the names of their capitals, London, Berlin, Vienna, 
Moscow. Well, from the time that they put foot on the 
soil of this city, from the time that the hoofs of their horses 
rang on the pavements of our streets, Austrians, English, 
Prussians, Russians, all, in entering Paris, saw in these 
walls, in these buildings, in this people, something pre- 
destinated, venerable and august ; all felt the holy honor of 
the sacred city, and understood that they did not have there 


140 Napoleon the Little. 


before them the city of a people, but of the human race; 
all lowered the sword ! 

Yes, massacre the Parisians, treat Paris like a place taken 
by assault, put to the sack a quarter of Paris, violate the 
Second Eternal City, murder civilization in its shrine, mow 
down old men, children, and women with grape-shot in 
this great enclosure, this light-house of the world. What 
Wellington forbade to his half naked mountaineers, what 
Schwartzenburg refused to his Croats, what Blucher did not 
permit his landwehr to do, nor Platow dare to have done 
by his Cossacks, thou hast made French soldiexs do, wretch ! 


BOOK FOURTH.—THE OTHER 
CRIMES. 





Creer tr R- F. 
SINISTER QUESTIONS. 


Wuat is the total of the dead? Louis Bonaparte, per- 
ceiving history approach, and imagining that Charles the 
Ninths are able to extenuate St. Bartholomews, has pub- 
lished, by way of justification, a statement of the ‘‘de- 
ceased persons,” called ‘‘ official.” One remarks in this 
‘*alphabetical list”* allusions such as these; Adde, book- 
seller, Boulevard Poissonniére, 17, killed in his house; 
Boursier, child, 7 years and a half old, killed in Tiquetonne- 
street; Belval, cabinet-maker, La Lune-street, No. 10, 
killed in his house ; Coquard, freeholder at Vire (Calvados), 
killed, Boulevard Montmartre ; Debaecque, merchant, Du 
Sentier-street, 45, killed at his house; De Convercelle, flor- 
ist, St. Denis-street, 257, killed at his house; Labilte, 
jeweler, boulevard Saint Martin, 63, killed at his house ; 


* The employee who prepared this list we know as a scientific and ex- 
act statistician; he prepared it in good faith, we do not doubt. He veri- 
fied what they showed him, and what they allowed him to ascertain; but 
he was able to arrive at no certainty about what they hid from him, The 
field remains open to conjecture. 


142 Napoleon the Little, 


Monpelas, perfumer, St. Martin-street, 181, killed at his house; 
Grellier, spinster, working-woman, Faubourg St. Martin, 209, © 
killed Boulevard Montmartre ; Guillard, shop-woman, Fau- 
bourg St. Denis, 77, killed Boulevard St. Denis ; Garnier, 
confidential business woman, Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle,No. 
6, killed Boulevard St. Denis ; Ledaust, working-woman, Pas- 
sage du Cassé, 76, at the dead-house ; Frances Noel, waist- 
coatmaker, Des Fosse, Montmartre-street, 20, dead at the Char- 
ity ; Count Poninski, annuitant, De la Paix-street, 32, killed 
Boulevard Montmartre; Radoisson, mantua-maker, dead 
at the Maison Nationale de Santé ; Vidal, 97, Temple-street, 
dead at the Hotel-Dieu ; Séquin, embroiderer, St. Martin, 
240, dead at Beaujon hospital ; Miss Leniac, shop-girl, Tem- 
ple-street, 196, dead at the Beaujon hospital; Thirion de 
Montauban, landlord, de Lancry-street, 10, killed at his 
door =.etc., etc: 

Let us abridge. Louis Bonaparte, in this document, 
avows one hundred and ninely-one assassinations. 

This registered statement taken for what it is worth, what 
is the true total? What is the real number of victims? 
With how many corpses is the coup d‘état of December 
strewed? Who can tell? Who knows? Who will ever 
know? As we have seen above, one witness deposes: ‘‘I 
counted there thirty-three corpses.” Another, at another 
point on the Boulevard, says: ‘‘We counted eighteen 
corpses within a length of twenty or twenty-five paces.” 
Another, standing elsewhere, says: ‘‘ There were, within 
sixty paces, more than sixty corpses.” The writer, so long 
time threatened with death, told us ourselves :. ‘‘I saw with 
my own eyes more than eight hundred dead throughout all 
the length of the Boulevard.” Now search, calculate, what 


Napoleon the Little. 143 


broken skulls and chests plowed with grape-shot are neces- 
sary to cover, literally with blood, a quarter of a league 
of boulevard, Do as the wives did, as the sisters did, 
as the daughters did, as the despairing mothers did: take 
a torch, go away into this night, feel on the ground, feel 
the pavement, the wall ; pick up the corpses, question the 
specters, and count if you can the number of victims! 
One is reduced to conjectures. It is a question which his- 
tory reserves. As for us, we assume the duty of examining 
it to its depths at a future time. The first day, Louis Bona- 
parte made a show of his slaughter. We have said why: 
it was useful to him. After which, having drawn from the 
thing all the advantage which he desired, he hid it, 
They gave the order to the newspapers in his interests to 
keep quiet about it, to Magnan to omit it, to the historians 
to ignore it. They interred the dead after midnight, with- 
out torches, without processions, without chants, without 
priests,—furtively. They forbade the families to weep too 
loud. And there was not only the massacre on the Boule- 
vard, there was the rest—summary fusillades, unpublished 
executions. 

One of the witnesses whom we interrogated asked a 
major of the gendarmerie mobile, which distinguished itself 
in these slaughters: ‘* Well, let us see! Thenumber? Is 
it four hundred ?” The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Is it 
six hundred?” The man shook his head. “Is it eight 
hundred?” ‘Add twelve hundred,” said the officer, ‘‘ and 
you will not be beyond it.” To the present hour nobody 
knows exactly what the 2d of December is, what it 
did, what it dared, whom it has killed, whom it has 
shrouded, whom it has buried. Since the morning of the 


144 Napoleon the Little. 


crime the printing-offices have been put under seal, speech 
has been suppressed by Louis Bonaparte, the man of 
silence and of night. The 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th, and since, 
the truth has been taken by the throat and strangled at the 
moment when it was about to speak. It has not even been 
able to utter a cry. He has tried to thicken obscurity over 
his ambush and he has partially succeeded. Whatever may 
be the efforts of history, the 2d of December will be 
plunged, perhaps for a long time yet, in a sort of frightful 
twilight. This crime is composed of audacity and darkness ;. 
on one side it spreads itself out cynically in full day ; on 
the other it undresses itself and goes away into the fog. 
An effrontery oblique and hideous which hides one knows 
not what monstrosities under its mantle! What one catches 
a glimpse of is enough. Ona certain side of the 2d of 
December all is darkness, but one sees tombs in this 
darkness. Under this grand outrage one distinguishes 
confusedly a crowd of outrages. 

Providence desires it thus. He attaches necessities to 
treasons. Ah! you perjure yourself! you violate your 
oath! you infringe right and justice! Well! take a 
cord, for you will be forced to strangle; take a poig- 
nard, for you will be forced to stab; take a club, for 
you will be forced to crush; take shadow and night, for 
you will be forced to hide yourself. One crime necessitates 
another ; horror is full of logic. One does not stop, one 
does not hesitate. Go! this first; well, And then that, 
and then still that; advance always! the law is like the 
veil of the temple; when it is torn, it is from the top to 
the bottom. Yes, let us repeat it, in what they call the 
2d of December one finds crime at every depth. Per- 


Napoleon the Little. 145 


jury on the surface, assassination at the bottom. Indi- 
vidual murders, slaughters en masse, volleys of grape- 
shot in full day, volleys of musketry by night, a vapor 
of blood issues from all parts of the coup d’état. Search 
in the public graves of the cemeteries, search under the 
pavements of the streets, under the slopes of the Champs de 
Mars, under the trees in the public gardens, look in the 
bed of the Seine! Few revelations. 

It is perfectly plain. Bonaparte has had the monstrous 
art to bind to himself a crowd of miserable men in the 
offices of the nation, by I know not what universal 
complicity. The stamped paper of the magistrates, the 
ink-horns of the recorders, the cartridge-boxes of the 
soldiers, the prayers of the priests, are his accomplices. 

He has cast his crime around him like a net, and the 
prefects, the mayors, the judges, the officers, and the 
soldiers are taken in it. The complicity descends from 
the general to the corporal, and re-ascends from the cor- 
poral to the president. The policeman feels himself as 
much compromised as the minister. The gendarme, 
whose pistol is at the ear of an unfortunate, and whose 
uniform is splashed with human brains, feels himself as 
guilty as the colonel. Above, atrocious men gave orders 
which were executed below by ferocious men. Ferocity 
keeps the secret with atrocity. 

Hence this hideous silence. 

Between this ferocity and this atrocity, there is even a 
strife and emulation, what escapes the one, the other seizes 
again. ‘The future will not be able to believe these pro- 
digies of animosity. A workman was passing by on the 
Pont-au-Change, some marching gendarmes arrested him, 


146 Napoleon the Little. 


they smelt his hands. He smells of powder, said a gen- 
darme. They shoot the workman ; four balls passed through 
his body. Throw him into the water, cries a sergeant. 
The gendarmes take him by the head and feet and throw 
him over the balustrade of the bridge. The man shot and 
drowned goes away down the river. However, he is not 
dead ; the icy cold of the river revives him; he is past 
making a movement, his blood flows into the water from 
four wounds, but his blouse sustains him. He comes ashore 
under the arch of a bridge. There the harbor people 
find him, they pick, him up, they carry him to the hospital, 
he gets well; and when convalescent he goes out. The 
next day they arrest him, and bring him before a court- 
martial. Death having refused him, Louis Bonaparte 
takes him back. The man is to-day at Lambessa! What 
the Champs de Mars especially has seen, the frightful noc- 
turnal scenes which have terrified and dishonored it, his- 
tory can no longer tell. Thanks to Louis Bonaparte, this 
august field of the federation must be henceforth called 
Aceldama ! 

One of the miserable soldiers whom the man of Decem- 
ber has transformed into an executioner, relates with hor- 
ror and below his breath, that in a single night the number 
of those shot was not less than eight hundred. Louis 
Bonaparte has dug a grave in haste, and cast his crime into 
it. A few shovelfuls of earth, the holy-water of a priest, 
and all was told. Now, the imperial carnival dances over 
it. Is that all? Is it finished? Does God permit and 
accept such shrouding? Do not-believe it. Some day, 
between the marble pavements of the Elysée and the Tuil- 
eries, this grave will re-open suddenly, and one will see all 


Napoleon the Little, 147 


the corpses come forth with their wounds one after the other. 
The young man stabbed to the heart, the old man shaking 
his old head pierced by a ball, the mother sabered with her 
slain infant in her arms, all standing, livid, terrible, and 
fixing on the assassin their bloody eyes! Awaiting that 
day, and from the present moment, history commences 
your trial, Louis Bonaparte. History rejects your official 
list of the dead and your justifying statements. History 
says that they lie, and that you lie. You have put a band- 
age over the eyes of France anda gag in her mouth. Why? 
Is it that you may do loyal actions? No, crimes. Who fears 
the light does evil. You have shot people by night, at 
the Champs de Mars, at the Prefectures, at the Palais de 
Justice, on the squares, on the quays, everywhere. You 
say no. I say yes. With you, one has the right to sup- 
pose, to suspect, to accuse, and when you deny, one has 
the right to believe ; your denial is recognized as an affir- 
mation. Your 2d of December is pointed at by the pub- 
lic conscience. No one thinks of it without a secret 
shudder. What did you do in that shadow there? Your 
days are hideous, your nights are suspected. Ah, what a 
man of darkness you are! Let us return to the butchery 
of the Boulevards, to the words: ‘‘ Let them execute my 
orders,” and to the day of the 4th. Louis Bonaparte on the 
evening of that day ought to have compared himself to 
Charles X., who did not desire to burn Paris; and with 
Louis Philippe, who did not wish to shed the blood of 
the people: and he ought to have done himself this justice, 
and claimed that he was a great politician! A few days after- 
ward, M. Le général Th., formerly attached to one of Louis 
Philippe’s sons, came to the Elysée. As far as Louis Bona- 


148 Napoleon the Little. 


parte could see him, making in his mind the comparison 
which we have just indicated, he cried with an air of triumph 
to the general : ‘‘ Well? M. Louis Bonaparte is actually the 
man who said to one of his former ministers, from whom we 
have it, ‘Z/I had been Charles X., and of in the days of 
July I had taken Laffite, Benjamin Constant, and Lafeyette, 
LT would have had them shol like dogs.’”” The 4th of December 
Louis Bonaparte would have been torn in the evening from 
the Elysée, and the law would have triumphed, if he had 
been one of these men who hesitate before a massacre. 
By good luck for him, he had none of that delicacy. A 
few corpses more or less, what difference does that make? 
Come, kill! Kill at hazard! Saber, shoot, cannonade, 
crush, grind! Terrify me this odious city of Paris! The 
coup d’état was leaning over, this great murder raised it up 
again. Louis Bonaparte had failed to destroy himself by 
his felony, he saved himself by his ferocity, If he had 
only been Faliero it would have been all up with him; 
happily he was Czesar Borgia. He went to swim with his 
crime ina river of blood; a less guilty man would have 
been drowned. He crossed it. That is what they call his 
success. To-day he is on the other bank, trying to dry 
himself, all streaming with the blood which he takes for 
the purple, and demanding the empire. 


CE Ar PE Re Li 


A SUCCESSION OF CRIMES. 


Anp there is this malefactor! And one would not ap- 
plaud thee, O Truth! when, in ‘‘the eyes of Europe, in 
the eyes of the world, in the presence of the people, before 
the face of God; while calling honor, the oath, faith, 
religion, sacredness of the human life, the right, the 
generosity of all souls, wives, sisters, mothers, civili- 
zation, liberty, the Republic, France to witness; before 
his valets, his Senate, and his Council of State; before 
his generals, his priests, and his agents of police; those 
who represented the people, for the people are reality ; 
those who represented intelligence, for intelligence is light ; 
those who represented humanity, for humanity is reason ; 
in the name of this people enchained, in the name of in- 
telligence proscribed, in the name of humanity outraged ; 
before this heap of slaves who cannot or who dare not say 
a word, thou dost lash this brigand of order like a dog! Ah, 
let somebody else pick out moderate words. Yes, I am 
clear and hard, I am without pity for this®merciless man, 
and I glory init. Let us go on. To what we have just 
recounted add all the other crimes, to which we shall have 
more than one occasion to return, and whose history we 
will recount in detail, if God grant us life. Let us add the 
incarcerations en masse, aggravated by ferocious circum- 


150 Napoleon the Little. 


stances, the prisons overflowing.* The sequestration} of 
the goods of the proscribed in ten departments, especially 
in Nievre, in ]’Allier, and in les Basses-Alpes; let us add 
the confiscation of the goods of Orleans, with that morsel 
given to the clergy. Schinderhannes always took the part 
of the clergy. Add the mixed commission, and the com- 
mission called that of clemency ;{ the courts-martial, com- 





* The Bulletin des Lois publishes the following decree, under the date 
of 27th March: ‘ Seeing that the law of the roth of May, 1838, classes 
the ordinary expenses of the prisons of the departments among those 
which ought to be inscribed upon the budgets of the departments: Con- 
sidering that such is not the character of the expenses occasioned by the 
arrests which have taken place following the events of December: con- 
sidering that the facts, because of which these arrests were multiplied, 
were connected with a plot against the safety of the State, the suppression 
of which was of consequence to all society, and that for that reason it is 
best to make the public treasury meet the excess of expenditure which re- 
sulted from the extraordinary increase of the numbers imprisoned, it is 
decreed: There is opened to the Minister of the Interior, on the funds 
of the budget of 1851, an extraordinary credit of 250,000 francs, to be 
applied to the payment of the expenses resulting from the arrests effected 
in consequence of the events of December.” 

+ Digne, the sth of January, 1852.—‘ The colonel commanding during 
the state of siege in the departments of the Basses-Alpes—A ppoints—A fter 
ten days’ delay, the goods of those inculpated, who have taken flight, will 
be sequestered, and administered by the director of the domains in the de- 
partment of Basses-Alpes, conformably with the laws civil and military, 
etc.—Fririon.” One could cite ten similar proclamations of martial law. 
The first of the malefactors who committed this cri:ne of confiscation of 
goods, and who set the example of this kind of arrests, is called Eynard. 
He is a general. Since the 18th December he put under sequestration the 
goods of a certain number of citizens from Moulins, ‘‘ because,”’ said he, 
cynically, ‘*the examination which has been commenced leaves no doubt 
as to the part which they took in the insurrection and the pillaging of the 
department of Allier,”’ 


f{ The number of condemnations entirely carried out (they had reference 


Napoleon the Little. ESI 


bined with the duty of the examining magistrates and 
multiplying the abominations ; the people exiled by batches ; 
the expulsion of a part of France out of France; from no 
more than a single department, Hérault, three thousand 
two hundred banished or transported. Add this shocking 
proscription, comparable with the most tragic desolations 
of history, which, for tendency, for opinion, for honestly 
differing from this government, for a word of a free man, 
spoken even before the 2d of December, takes, seizes, 
arrests, tears the laborer from his field, the workman 
from his trade, the freeholder from his house, the physician 
from his patients, the notary from his study, the councillor- 
general from his administration, the judge from his tribunal, 
the husband from his wife, the brother from his brother, 
the father from his children, the child from his parents, 
and marks all foreheads with a sinister cross, from the 
highest to the most obscure. Noone escapes him. A man 
in rags, with his beard long, enters my room one morning 
at Bruxells. ‘‘I have just arrived,” says he. ‘‘I have 
made the journey on foot. It is two days since I have 

eaten anything.” You give him some bread. He eats. 
=i say to him: “Where do you come from?” ‘‘ From 
Limoges.” ‘‘Why are you here?” ‘‘I do not know. 
They chased me from my home.” ‘‘ What are you?” 
‘“‘T am a sabot-maker.” Add Africa, add Guiana, add the 


most generally to transportations) were found, at the date of the reports, 
as follows :-— 
Arrested by M. Canrobert.... . 3876 
eg M. Espinasse ..... 3625 
sf M. Quenlin Bauchart . 1634 


152 Napoleon the Little. 


atrocities of Bertrand, the atrocities of Martinprey, those of 
Canrobert and Espinasse, the cargoes of women dispatched 
by General Goyon, the representative Miot dragged from 
casemate to casemate, the barracks where there are a hun- 
dred and fifty under the sun of the tropics, huddled pro- 
miscuously, with filth, with vermin, and where all these in- 
nocent people are dying, far from their friends, in fever, in 
misery, in horror, in despair, wringing their hands. Add 
all those unfortunates delivered to the gendarmes, bound 
two and two, stowed away in the spare-decks of the J/a- 
gellan, of the Canada, or of the Dugnesclin ; cast away to 
Lambessa, cast to Cayenne, without knowing what they 
wanted with them, without being able to guess what they 
had done. This one, Alphonse Lambert, from !’Indre, 
torn from his bed, dying ; that other, Patureau Francceur, 
vine-dresser, transported, because in his village they had 
wished to make him president of the Republic; this 
other, Valette, carpenter at Chateaurouse, transported for 
having, six months before the 2d of December, on a day of 
capital punishment, refused to set up the guillotine. Add 
the hunt after men in the villages, the beating of Viroy in 
the mountains of Lure, the beating of Pellion in the Bois 
de Clamecy with fifteen hundred men ; order re-established 
at Crest, two thousand insurgents, three hundred killed ; 
marching columns everywhere; Charles Sauvan at Mar- 
seilles cries ‘‘ Vive la République!” A grenadier of the 
54th fires on him, the ball entering at the loins and going 
out at the stomach. Vincent, from Bourges, is assistant of 
his commune; he protests, as a magistrate, against the 
coup d'état ; they track him in his village ; he flies, they 
pursue ; a cavalry man cuts off two of his fingers with a 


=. = 


Napoleon the Little. 15% 


saber-stroke, another cuts open his head. He falls. They 
transport him to Fort d’Ivry before dressing his wounds. 
He is an old man of seventy-six years of age. Add such 
facts as these: In Cher, the representative Viguier was 
arrested. Arrested, what for? Because he is a represent- 
ative, because he is inviolable, decause the suffrage of the 
people has made him sacred. They cast Viguier into prison. 
One day they allowed him to be absent for one hour to 
attend to business which absolutely required his presence. 
Before going out, two gendarmes, named Pierre Guérét and 
Dubernelle, the latter a brigadier, seized upon Viguier ; 
the brigadier joined his hands in such a way that the palms 
were pressed together, and bound them tightly with a 
chain; the end of the chain hung down; the brigadier 
made the chain go around once more by main force at the 
risk of breaking or bruising his wrists by the pressure. 
The hands of the prisoner became blue and swelled. ‘‘ You 
are torturing me by this,” says Viguier, quietly. ‘‘ Hide 
your hands,” says the gendarme, chuckling, ‘‘if you are 
ashamed.” “ Wretch!” replied Viguier, “ you are the man 
that this chain dishonors, not I.” Viguier traversed in this 
ptight the streets of Bourges that he had frequented for 
twenty years, between two gendarmes, raising his hands, 
showing his chains. The representative Viguier is seventy 
years of age. Add the summary fusillades in twenty 
departments. “very one who resists,” wrote M. St, 
Arnaud, minister of war, ‘‘is to be shot in the name of 
society, in legitimate defence.”* 


* Here is this odious dispatch, just as it appeared in the Moniteur :— 
** All armed insurrection has ceased in Paris, on account of rigorous 
suppression, The same energy will have the same effect everywhere. 


154 Napoleon the Little. 


‘Six days sufficed to crush the insurrection,” General 
Levaillant sent word. (He was commanding during 
martial law in Var.) ‘‘I have made good captures,” De 
St.-Etienne sends word to the commandant at Viroy ; ‘‘I 
have shot without seizure eight individuals ; Iam hunting 
the ring-leaders in the woods.” At Bordeaux, General 
Bourjoly enjoins upon the marching columns to have all 
individuals shot who were found with arms in their hands. 
At Forcalquier, it is still better. The proclamation of 
martial law runs as follows: ‘‘The city of Forcalquier is 
under martial law; citizens who have nol taken part in the 
events of the day, who have arms, are summoned to deliver 
them up on pain of being shot.” The marching column 
of Pézénas arrived at Servian ; a man tried to escape from 
a surrounded house; they shot him dead. At Entrains 
they made twenty-five prisoners ; one tried to save himself 
by swimming, they fired on him, a ball hit him, he 
disappeared under the water; they shot the others. To 
these cursed things add these famous things: at Brioude, 
in Haute-Loire, a man and a woman thrown into prison for 
having worked in the field of one who had been proscribed ; 
at Loriol, in Dréme, Astier of the rural guard, condemned 
to twenty years’ work, of forced work, for having given 
asylum to fugitives; add, and the pen trembles to write 
this, the death penalty re-established, the political guillotine 
again set up, horrible sentences ; citizens condemned to 


$$ 


Bands which are engaged in pillage, rape, and arson put themselves beyond 
the protection of the law. With such one does not use argument, nor 
give any summons to disperse ; one attacks them and disperses them. 
Everybody who resists ought to be s/ot in the name of society, in legitimate 
defence,” 


Napoleon the Little. 155 


death on the scaffold by the janizary judges of courts- 
martial; at Clamecy, Millelot, Jouannin, Guillemot, 
Sabatier and Four ; at Lyons, Courty, Romegal, Bressieux, 
Fauritz, Julien, Roustain, and Garan, adjunct of the 
mayor of Cliousat ; at Montpelier, seventeen for the affair 
of Bédarrieux : Mercadier, Delpech, Denis, André, Barthez, 
Triadou, Piérre Carriére, Galzy, Calas called le Vacher, 
Gardy, Jacques Pages, Michel Hercules, Nar, Véne, Frié, 
Malaterre, Beaumont, Pradal; the six last, by good luck, 
contumacious ; and at Montpelier four others: Choumac, 
Vidal, Cadelard, de Pagés. 

What is the crime of these men? Their crime is yours, 
if you are a good citizen, it is mine, who write these 
lines. It is obedience to the rroth article of the 
Constitution. It is armed resistance to the outrage of 
Louis Bonaparte; and yet this council ‘‘ orders that the 
execution shall take place in the ordinary form, on one of 
the public places of Béziers” for the four last, and for the 
seventeen others on one of the public squares of Rédar- 
rieux.” The MMoniteur announces it. It is true that the 
Moniteur also at the same time announces that the collation 
at the last ball at the Tuileries was prepared by three 
hundred stewards, in the style rigorously prescribed by the 
ceremonial of the ancient imperial house. Unless a 
universal cry of horror stops this man, all these heads will 
fall. At this very hour in which we write here is what has 
just happened at Belley : 

A man from Bugez, near Belley, a workman named 
Charlet, had ardently sustained the candidateship of Louis 
Bonaparte up to the 1oth of December, 1848. He had 
distributed bulletins, contributed, canvassed, hawked ; the 


156 Napoleon the Little. 


election was for him a triumph; he believed in Louis 
Napoleon ; he took as serious the socialistic writings of the 
man of Ham and his humanitarian and republican bills ; 
on the 10th of December there were a good many of these 
honest dupes, who are to-day the most indignant of 
opponents. When Louis Bonaparte was in power, when 
one saw the man at work, the illusions vanished. Charlet, 
a man of intelligence, was one of those whose republican 
probity revolted, and little by little, in proportion as Louis 
Bonaparte sank more and more into reaction, Charlet 
detached himself from him ; he passed thus from adhesion 
the most confident, to opposition the most loyal and 
active. 

It is the history of many other noble hearts. On the 2d 
of December Charlet did not hesitate. In presence of all 
the combined attempts in the infamous act of Louis 
Bonaparte, Charlet felt the law stir in him ; he said that he 
ought to be so much the more severe since he was one of 
those whose confidence had been the most betrayed. He 
understood truly that there was but one duty for a citizen, 
a strict duty, and one which was indistinguishable from the 
right to defend the Republic, to defend the Constitution, 
and to resist by all possible means the man whom the left, 
and his crime still more than the left, had outlawed. The 
refugees from Switzerland passed the frontier in arms, 
crossed the Rhone near Anglefort and entered the 
department of Ain. Charlet joined them. At Seyssel the 
little band encountered the custom-house people. The 
latter, willing or misled accomplices of the coup d état, 
wished to oppose their passage. An engagement took place, 
one custom-house agent was killed. Charlet was taken. 


Napoleon the Little. ly) 


The coup d’état brought Charlet before a court-martial, 
They accused him of the death of the custom-house 
officer, which, after all, was only an accident in the fight. 
In any case Charlet was guiltless of this death ; the man 
had fallen pierced by a ball, and Charlet had no arm but a 
sharpened, file. Charlet did not recognize the group of 
men who pretended to judge him as a tribunal. He 
said tothem: ‘‘ You are not judges; where is the law ? 
' the law is on my side.” He refused to answer. 
Interrogated on the fact of the death of the employee, 
he could have cleared up everything with a word ; but to 
descend to an explanation would have been in a certain 
degree to accept the tribunal. He did not desire it; he 
kept silence. ‘‘ These men condemned him to death ac- 
cording to the ordinary form of criminal executions.’ The 
condemnation pronounced, they seemed to forget him ; days 
weeks, months, ran by. On all sides in the prison they said 
to Charlet: ‘‘ You are saved.” The 29th of June, at day- 
break, the city of Belley saw a dismal thing. The scaf- 
fold had come out of the earth during the night, and was 
standing erect in the middle of the publicsquare. The in- 
habitants accosted each other, pale as death, and asked each 
other: ‘‘ Have you seen what is on the square?” ‘‘ Yes.” 
‘For whom?” It was for Charlet. The sentence of death 
had been referred to M. Bonaparte ; it had slumbered for 
along time at the Elysée ; they had other business ; but 
one fine morn, afier seven months, after everybody had 
forgotten about the engagement at Seyssel, and the slain 
cusiom-house officer and Charlet, M. Bonaparte, having 
probably wanted to put something between the féte of the 
roth of May and that of the 15th of August, signed the 


158 Napoleon the Little. 


order for the execution. On the 29th of June, scarcely a 
few days ago, Charlet was taken from his prison. They 
told him that he was going to die. He remained calm. 
A man who is on the side of justice does not fear death, 
for he feels that there are two things belonging to him: the 
one, his body, which they may kill; the other, justice, 
whose arm they do not bind, and whose head does not 
fall under the knife. They wished to have Charlet ride ina 
cart. ‘‘No,” said he, to the gendarmes, ‘‘ I will go on foot ; 
I can walk, I am not afraid.” The crowd was great when 
he passed. Everybody in the city knew him and loved 
him ; his friends tried to catch a look from him. Charlet, 
with his arms tied behind his back, bowed to many on the 
rightand left. ‘‘Good-bye, Jacques! good-bye, Pierre!” said 
he, and smiled. ‘‘ Good-bye, Charlet,” they answered, and 
all wept. The gendarmes and the troops of the line sur- 
rounded the scaffold. He mounted it with a quiet and firm 
step. When they saw him standing erect on the scaffold, 
a shuddering seized the crowd; the women uttered cries, 
the men shook their fists. While they were buckling him 
on the platform he looked at the knife and said: *‘ When I 
think that I have been a Bonapartist !”” and then raising his 
eyes to heaven, he cried, ‘‘ Vive la République!” A moment 
after his head fell. There was mourning in Belley, and in 
all the villages of Ain. ‘‘ How did he die?” they asked. 
‘«Bravely.” ‘‘ God be praised !” 

It is in this fashion that a man has just been killed. Thought 
succumbs, and sinks in horror in presence of a fact so mon- 
strous. This crime, added to the other crimes, completes 
them, and seals them with a sort of sinister seal. Itis more 
than a comnletion of them, it is a crowning of them. One 


Napoleon the Little. 159 


feels that M. Bonaparte ought to be content. To have, it 
matiers not whom, shot in the night in obscure places, in 
solitude, at the Champs de Mars, under the arches of the 
bridges, behind a deserted wail, at hazard, pell-mell, un- 
known specters, even the number of whom one does not 
know ; to have the nameless killed by the nameless, and that 
all this should go away into the darkness, into nothingness, 
into forgetfulness; in fact, it is little satisfactory to our 
vanity ; one has the air of hiding himself, and truly one 
hides himself effectively ; it is mediocre. People who 
have scruples have the right to tell you: ‘‘ You see plainly 
that you also are afraid; you would not dare to do these 
things in public; you recoil before your own acts.” And 
in a certain measure they seem to be right. To musket 
people by night, that is a violation of all laws, divine and 
human; but it is not sufficiently insolent. One does not 
feel himself triumphant after it. Something better is pos- 
sible. The full day, the public square, the legal scaffold, 
the regular apparatus of social vengeance, to deliver inno- 
cent men to that, to make them perish in that manner. 
Ah! that is different; speak to me of this! To commita 
murder in full noon, in the very middle of a village, by 
means of a machine called a court-martial, by means of 
another machine slowly built by a carpenter, put together, 
bolted, screwed, and greased at leisure ; to say, it will be at 
such an hour; to bring two baskets and say : ‘‘ This will be 
for the body, this will be for the head ;” the hour arriving, 
to take the victim, bound with cords, assisted by a priest, 
to proceed to the murder with calmness. To charge the 
registrars to prepare an accurate record of it; to surround 
_ the murder with the gendarmes and the drawn saber, in such 


160 Napoleon the Little. 


amanner that the pecple who are there shudder, and no 
longer know what they are looking at, and doubt if these 
men in uniform are a brigade of gendarmes or a band of 
brigands, and ask themselves, while watching the man who 
Jets the knife go, whether he is the executioner or whether 
he is not rather an assassin! This is what is bold and 
firm ; this is a parody on a legal proceeding very shameless 
and very tempting, and worth the trouble of carrying out ; 
this is a grand and splendid blow on the cheek of justice. 
Very well! Todo that seven months after the struggle, 
coldly, uselessly, as a’ slip of memory that one repairs, as 
a duty that one accomplishes, it is shocking, it is complete ; 
one has an air of being in the right which stupefies the con- 
science, and which make honest men shudder. Terrible 
comparison, and one which contains the whole situation. 
Here are two men, a workman anda prince. The prince 
commits a crime, he enters the Tuileries ; the workman 
does his duty, he mounts the scaffold.. And who is it who 
erects the scaffold for the workman? it is the prince. 
Yes, this man who, if he had been conquered in Decem- 
ber, would only have escaped the death penalty by the 
omnipotence of progress, and by an application, surely too 
generous, of the inviolability of human life. This man, 
this Louis Bonaparte, this prince who adopts in his policy 
Poulmann’s and Soufflard’s style of doing things, it is he who 
rebuilds the scaffold! and he does not tremble! he does 
not grow pale! and he does not perceive that it is a fatal 
ladder which is there, that one is able to desist from raising 
it, but that once raised, one is no longer able to throw it 
down ; and that he who sets it up for others finds it harder 
for himself! It recognizes him, and says: ‘‘ You have put 


Napoleon the Little. 161 


me here! I have waited for you.” No! this man does 
not reason ; he has wants, he has caprices; it is necessary 
that he should satisfy them. These are the desires of a 
dictator. 

Omnipotence would be insipid if one did not season it 
in this style. Come, cut off Charlet’s head, and the heads 
of the others; M. Bonaparte is prince-president of the 
French Republic; M. Bonaparte has sixteen millions a 
year, forty-four thousand francs a day ; twenty-eight cooks 
for his personal service, as many aids-de-camp ; he has the 
right of fishing in the ponds of Saclay and St. Quentin, and 
of hunting in the forests of Laign, d’Ourscamp, and of 
Carlemont, and in the woods of Champagne and Barbeau ; 
he has the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Elysée, Rambouillet, 
Saint Cloud, Fontainebleau, Versailles, Compiégne ; he has 
his imperial box at all the plays, féte, and gala-day, and music 
every day ; the smile of M. Sibour,* and the arm of Mme. 
la Marquise de Douglas to entera ball-room,—all that does 
not suffice him, he still must have the guillotine. He must 
have a few of these red baskets among the baskets of Cham- 
pagne. Oh! let us hide our faces with our hands! This 
man—this hideous butcher of right and of justice—had still 
his apron on his stomach and his hands in the smoking en- 
trails of the Constitution, and his feet in the blood of all the 
slaughtered laws, when you, judges, you, magistrates, men 
of the law, men of the right * * * But I stop; I will find 
you again, later on, with your black robes and your red robes, 
with your robes of the color of ink and your robes the color 
of blood, and I wiil find them again, also; I have already 
chastised them, and will chastise them again—those others, 


* Then Archbishop of Paris, 


162 Napoleon the Little. 


your chiefs, these jurist sustainers of the ambush, these prosti- 
tuted men, this Delangie, this Baroche, this Suin, this Royer, 
this Mongis, this Rouher, this Troplong, deserter of the 
laws, all those names which no longer express anything else 
than the quantity of contempt possible to man, And if he 
has not sawed these victims between two planks, like Chris- 
tiern II. ; if he has not buried these people alive, like Ludo- 
vic the Moor; if he has not built the walls of his palace 
out of living men and stones, like Timour-Beig, who was 
born, says the legend, with hands clinched and full of blood ; 
if he has not ripped up the stomachs of pregnant women, 
like Caesar, Duke de Valentinois ; if he has not had women 
kicked by horses in the breast, sestibusgue viros, like Ferdi- 
nand of Toledo; if he has not roasted alive, burned alive, 
boiled alive, skinned alive, crucified, impaled, quartered, 
don’t blame him for it, it is not his fault: it is because the 
century obstinately refuses to let him do it. He has done 
all that was humanly or inhumanly possible ; the nineteenth 
century—century of sweetness, the century of decline, as the 
absolutists and the papists say—being given, Louis Bona- 
parte has equalled in ferocity his contemporaries, Haynau, 
Radetzky, Filangieri, Schwartzenberg, and Ferdinand of 
Naples, and has even surpassed them. A rare merit, and 
one of which it is necessary to keep account ; as also of 
one difficulty in addition: the scene transpired in France. 
Let us render him this justice: in the times in which we 
live, Ludovic Sforza, le Valentinois, the Duke of Alva, Ti- 
mour, and Christiern IT., would have done nothing more 
than Louis Bonaparte. In their epoch, he would have 
done all that they have; in ours, at the moment of con- 
structing and erecting gibbets, wheels, racks, cranes for tor- 


Napoleon the Little. 163 


ture by the kicking and plunging of horses, living towers, 
crosses, and piles of wood, they would have stopped as 
he has, in spite of them and mysteriously to them, before 
the secret and invincible resistance of the moral centre, © 
before the invisible force of progress accomplished, before 
the formidable and mysterious refusal of an entire century, 
which arises at the north, at the south, at the east, at the 
west, around tyrants, and tells them, No! 


CHA Pal ER la, 
WHAT 1852 MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 


But without this execrable ‘‘necessity,” the 2d of 
December, as the accomplices, and following them the 
dupes, call it, what would have taken place in France? 
My God! this. Let us go back a fewsteps and briefly 
recall the situation as it was before the coup d’état. 

The party of the past, under the name of the party of 
order, resisted the Republic, in other words resisted the 
future. Let one oppose it or not, let one consent to it or 
not, every illusion laid aside, the Republic is the future of 
nations ; it may be near or far, but it is inevitable. How 
shall the Republic be established? It can be established 
in two ways: by struggle or by progress. 

The Democrats wish it by progress ; their opponents, the 
men of the past, seem to wish it by struggle. As we have 
just recalled, the men of the past resist ; they are bitterly ob- 
stinate ; they strike the tree with the hatchet, imagining that 
this will arrest the sap which mounts. They are prodigal of 
force, puerility, and anger. Let us cast no bitter words at 
our ancient adversaries who have fallen together with us, 
the same day that we fell, and several honorably, as far as 
their intentions were concerned. Let us limit ourselves to 
proving that it was into this struggle that the majority of the 
Legislative Assembly of France had entered from the first 
days of their installation, since the month of May, 1849. 
This policy of resistance is a fatal policy. This struggle of 


Napoleon the Little. 165 


man against God is necessarily vain ; barren in result, it is 
fruitful in catastrophes. ' What is to be will be; it is 
necessary that what is to flow should flow, that what is to 
fall should fall, that what is to be born should be born, 
that what is to grow should grow; but put obstacles in the 
way of these natural laws, trouble arises and disorder 
commences. 

A sad thing it is, this @sorder that they have named 
order. Bind up a vein, you have disease ; stop up a river, 
you have inundation ; bar the future, you have revolutions ; 
obstinately persist in keeping in the midst of you, as if it 
were living, the past, which is dead, you produce I do not 
know what moral cholera. The corruption expands, it is in 
the air, one breathes it ; entire classes of society, the office- 
holders, for example, are falling into rottenness. Keep 
corpses in your houses, the pestilence will break out. 
Fatally does this policy blind those who practice it. 
These men, who style themselves statesmen, are so far blind 
as not to see that they themselves, with their own hands 
and at great pains, and by the sweat of their brows, have 
caused the terrible events which they lament, and _ that 
those catastrophes which are falling down upon them have 
been caused by them. What would they say of a peasant 
who would make an embankment from one bank of a 
stream to the other, before his cottage door, and who, when 
the river became a torrent, and should pass over its banks, 
when it should sweep down his wall, when it should take 
off his roof, should cry, wicked river! The statesmen of 
the past, these great constructors of dikes across streams, 
pass their time in crying, wicked people! 

Take away Polignac and the proclamations of July, that 


166 Napoleon the Little. 


is to say, the dams, and Charles X. would be dead at the 
Tuileries. Reform, in 1847, the electoral law; that is to 
say again, take away the dam, Louis Philippe would be 
dead on the throne. Is that as much as to say that the 
Republic would not have come? No. The Republic, let 
us repeat it, is the future ; it would have come but step by 
step, gain by gain, conquest by conquest, as a river which 
flows and not like a deluge which invades. It would have 
come in its hour, when all would have been ready to 
receive it ; it would have come not certainly more likely to 
live, for from the present time it is indestructible; but 
more tranquilly, without possible reaction, without princes 
lying in ambush for it, without coups d’état behind it. 
The policy of resistance to the onward movement excels, 
let us again insist, in creating artificial inundations. Thus 
it succeeded in making of the year 1852 a sort of fearful 
crisis, and that always by the same process, by the means 
of adam. Here is a railroad; the train will pass in an 
hour ; throw a beam across the rails, when the train arrives 
it will be wrecked over it; you will have Fampoux ; take 
away the beam before the arrival of the train, the train will 
pass without even a suspicion that there was a catastrophe 
awaiting it. This beam is the law of the 31st of May. 
The chiefs of the majority of the Legislative Assembly had 
cast it across 1852, and they cried: “It is thus that society 
will be broken up!” The left said to them: “Take away 
the beam, take away the beam, let universal suffrage pass 
freely.” This is the whole history of the law~of the 31st 
of May. These are things that an infant could compre- 
hend, and that statesmen do not comprehend. Now let 
us answer at once the question which we have put: 


Napoleon the Little. 167 


Without the 2d of December, what would have come 
to pass in 1852? Suppress the law of the 31st of May, 
take away from the people their dam, take away from 
Bonaparte his lever, his arm, his pretext; let universal 
suffrage alone, take the beam off the rails, do you know 
what you would have had in 1852? 

Nothing. 

Some elections. : 

Some calm Sunday-like days, when the people would 
have come to vote ; yesterday workman, to-day elector, to— 
morrow workman, always sovereign. You reply: Yes, 
elections! You speak of them quite at your ease. But 
the “red chamber” which would have issued out of those 
elections? Did they not announce that the Constitution of 
1848 would be a “red chamber?” Red chambers, red 
specters, red croque-mitaines ;* all these predictions go 
for what they are worth. Those who carry about these 
magic lanterns at the end of a stick, before the angry 
population know what they are about,and laugh behind 
the horrible rag that they wave. Under the long scarlet 
robe of the phantom to which they have given this name, 
1852, we see the great boots of the coup d’état stick out. 





* Nursery horror, 


CH AP TE RY SEN 


JACQUERIE.* 


However, after the 2d of December, the crime once 
committed, it was very necessary to throw opinion off the 
scent. The coup d’état began exclaiming at jacquerie as the 
assassin exclaimed at the thief. Let us add, that a jacquerie 
had been promised, and that M. Bonaparte could not with- 
out some inconvenience fail at the same time in a// his 
promises. What was the red specter except a jacquerie? 
It was quite necessary to give some reality to the specter. 
One could not burst out laughing rudely in the face of the 
people and say: ‘‘there was nothing! I have made you 
There has then been a “‘jac- 
querie ;’ the promises of the post-bills have been kept. 


I 


afraid of your own shadows.’ 


The imaginations of those about one have given themselves 
scope ; they have unburied the frights of Mother Goose, 
and more than one child, in reading the journal, will be able 
to recognize the ogre of the good fellow Perrault, disguised — 
as a socialist. They have supposed ; they have invented ; 
the press being suppressed, it was very simple; to lie is 
easy, when one has in advance torn out the tongue of con- 
tradiction. Theycried: “Alarm, bourgeois, without us you 
are lost. We have shot at you with grape, but it was for 
your good. Look, the Lollards were at your door, the 
Anabaptists were scaling your walls, the Hussites were 
knocking in your venetian blinds, the Hungry Boys were 





* Rising of the peasants. 


Napoleon the Little. 169 


coming up your staircases, the Hollow Stomachs were look- 
ing greedily at your dinner. Look out, have not mesdames 
your wives been really violated, They have given the floor 
to one ofthe principal editors of Za Pa/rie, named Froissard. 
-——‘‘T would neither dare write, nor recount the horrible and 
‘‘ improper deeds that they were doing to the ladies. But 
‘among the other misdemeanors and villainous acts, they 
‘* killed a chevalier and put him on a spit, and turned him 
‘‘at the fire and roasted him before his wife and _ her chil- 
‘‘dren. After ten or twelve had forced and violated the 
‘‘lady, they wished to make them eat of it (the corpse !) 
‘“ by force, and then killed them and made them die pain- 
“*ful deaths! These wicked people robbed and burned 
*‘everything, and killed and forced and violated all 
‘“Jadies and virgins without pity or mercy, like mad dogs. 
**Such hordes maintained themselves between Paris and 
‘* Noyon, and between Paris and Soissons, and Ham and 
‘‘Vermandois, through all Coucy. These were the great 
‘‘violators and malefactors ; and they estimate that in the 
‘*bishoprics of Laon, of Soissons, and of Noyon, between 
‘«the Comité de Valois, more than a hundred chateaux, and 
**country residences of gentlemen and esquires, were en- 
“tered, and they killed and robbed as many as they found. 
“But God by his grace has provided such a remedy as 
*‘ought to make one return many thanks.” They only put 
God for my lord the prince-president. It was the least 
they could do. 

To-day, afier eight months have gone by, one knows 
how far to believe in this jacquerie. The facts have at 
last come out into full day. And where? How? Before 


the very tribunals of M. Bonaparte. The sub-prefects 
8 


170 Napoleon the Little. 


whose wives had been violated had never been mar- 
ried ; the curates who had been roasted alive, and whose 
hearts the jacques have eaten, have written that they are in 
good health ; the gendarmes around the corpses of whom 
they had danced have come to give evidence before the 
court-martial ; the public coffers which had been pillaged 
have found themselves intact in the hands of M. Bona- 
parte, who has “saved” them ; the famous deficit of five 
millions of francs from Clamecy, is reduced to two hun- 
dred francs spent for bread tickets. An official publication 
had said, on the 8th of December, ‘‘ The curate, the mayor, 
‘‘and the sub-prefect of Joigny, and several gendarmes 
‘have been massacred in the most cowardly manner.” 
Somebody answered in a letter, which was published, ‘* Not 
‘‘a drop of blood has been shed at Joigny, nobody’s life 
‘‘has been menaced there.” Who wrote that letter? This 
same mayor of Joigny, who had been massacred in a cowardly 
manner. M. Henri de Lacretelle, from whom an armed 
band had extorted two thousand francs, in his chateau of 
Cormatin is still stupefied to this hour, not at the extortion 
but at the fabrication. M. de Lamartine, whom another 
band had wanted to rob, and probably to hang up to the 
. lamp-post, and whose chateau of Saint-Point had been 
burnt, and who had written to secure indemnification from 
the government, learned all the entire circumstances from the 
journals, The following document was produced before 
the court-martial of la Niévre, at which ex-colonel Martin- 
prey presided. 

‘‘OrDER OF THE CommiTTrEE.—Probity is a virtue of 
“Republicans. Zvery thief or plunderer shali be shot. Every 
‘‘owner of arms who in twelve hours shall not have de- 


Napoleon the Little. 171 


‘* posited them at the mayor’s office, or who shall not have 
‘given them up, shall be arrested and detained till the 
‘‘issuing of a neworder. Every citizen found drunk shall 
‘‘be disarmed and imprisoned. 

“* Clamecy, 7th December, 1851. 

‘* Vive la République Sociale. 
««The Revolutionary Socialist Committee.” 

What you have just read is the proclamation of the 
*«Jacques,” death to plunderers! death to thieves! Such 
is the cry of these thieves and plunderers. One of these 
Jacques, named Gustave Verdun-Lagarde, from Lot-et-Gar- 
onne, died in exile in Brussels, on the 1st of May, 1852, 
leaving a hundred thousand francs to his native city, to 
found there a school of agriculture. This divider* has 
divided indeed. There has not then been, and the 
honest card-house builders of the coup d’état agree to it to- 
day among their intimate associates, there has not been any 
‘* Jacquerie” it is true ; but theturn has been served. There 
was in the departments what there was in Paris, legal resist- 
ance, the resistance prescribed to the citizens by the rroth 
article of the Constitution, and by what is above the Con- 
stitution, by natural right; there has been legitimate defense 
(this time the word is in its place) against the ‘‘saviors,” 
the armed struggle of the right and the law against the in- 
famous insurrection of power. The Republic, suppressed 
by an ambush, has seized the coup d’état by the collar, and 
had been also seized by her. That is all. Twenty-eight 
departments rose up: Aix, Aube, Cher, the Bouches-du- 
Rhone, la Cote-d’Or, la Haute-Garonne, Lotet-Garonne, 


* The name partageux is applied to extreme communists, who favor a 
division of property, 


172 Napoleon the Little. 


le Loiret, la Marne, la Meurthe, le Nord, le Bas-Rhin, le 
Rhone, Seine et Marne, I’Yonne, did their duty worthily ; 
l’Allier, les Basses-Alpes, l’Aveyron, la Dréme, le Gard, le 
Gers, l’Hérault, le Jura, la Niévre, le Puy-de- Dome, Sa6ne- 
et-Loire, le Var et Vaucluse, did it intrepidly. They suc- 
cumbed, as Paris did. 

The coup d’état was ferocious there, as at Paris. We 
have just cast a summary glance on its crimes. 

It is this resistance—legal, constitutional, virtuous, this 
resistance in which heroism was on the side of the citizens, 
and atrocity on the side of power, it is that which the coup 
d’état has called jacquerie. Let us repeat it. A little of 
the red specter was useful. This jacquerie was invented 
for two ends; it served in two ways the policy of the 
Elysée ; it offered a double advantage : on the one hand to 
make people vote ‘‘yes,” on the ‘‘plebiscitum’—to make 
them vote under the saber and in the face of the spacter— 
to silence the intelligent, to scare the credulous—terror 
for the latter, fear for the former, as we shall explain it 
soon, all the success and the entire secret of the vote of the 
2d of December is there ;—on the other hand, to give a 
pretext for proscriptions. 1852 did not, then, contain in 
itself any real danger. The law of the 31st of May, killed 
morally, was dead actually before the 2d of December. 
A new assembly, a new president, the Constitution purely 
and simply put in practice, some elections ; nothing more. 
Take away M. Bonaparte, and that is 1852. 

But it was necessary that M. Bonaparte should go away. 
There was the obstacle. From thence came the catastrophe. 
So, this man, one fine morning, took the Constitution, the 
Republic, the law, France, all, by the throat. He gave to 


Napoleon the Little. 173 


the future a stab from behind ; he trod under his feet the 
right, good sense, justice, reason, liberty ; he has arrested 
inviolable men, sequestered innocent men, banished illus- 
trious men ; he has seized the people in the persons of 
their representatives ; he has swept the boulevards of Paris 
with grape-shot ; he has made his cavalry wade in the blood 
of old men and women ; he has shot without a summons 
to disperse, he has shot without judgment; he has filled 
Mazas, la Conciérgerie, Sante-Pélagie, Vincennes, the forts, 
the cells, the casemates, the dungeons, with prisoners, and 
the cemeteries with corpses; he has had the woman who 
carried the bread to her concealed husband put in St. La- 
zare ; he sent to the galleys for twenty years the man who 
gave refuge to a proscribed person ; he has torn up all the 
codes and violated all the injunctions; he has made the 
transported rot by thousands in the horrible holds of the 
hulks ; he has sent to Lambessa and Cayenne a hundred 
and fifty children, from twelve to fifteen years old. He 
who was more comical than Falstaff has become more terri- 
ble than Richard III. And why all this? Because there 
was a plot, as he said, against his power ; because the year 
which was ending had entered into a traitorous understand- 
ing with the year which was commencing, in order to over- 
throw him ; because the 45th article perfidiously concerted 
matters with the calendar to put him out; because the 
second Sunday of May wished to depose him ; because his 
oath had the audacity to plot his fall ; because his word of 
honor conspired against him. The morning after the tri- 
umph, they relate that he said: ‘‘The second Sunday of 
May is dead!” No! It is worth which is dead; it is 
honor which is dead; it is the name of the emperor 


174 Napoleon the Little. 


which is dead. How the man who is in the Chapelle St. 
Jerome ought to start up, and what despair he ought to 
manifest! Here is unpopularity which mounts around the 
great figure, and it is this fatal nephew who has put the 
ladder in position. Here are the great souvenirs standing in 
the background, and the evil souvenirs returning. One dares 
hardly speak any more of Jena, of Marengo, of Wagram. 
What are you speaking of? Of the Duc d’Enghien, of Jaffa, 
of the 18th Brumaire? One forgets the hero, and one sees 
only the despot. Caricature commences to torture the profile 
of Czesar, and then, what a personage at the side of him ! 
There are people already who confound the uncle with the 
nephew, to the joy of the Elysée, and to the shame of 
France. The author of the parody takes the airs of the 
head of the profession. Alas! on this immense splendor 
there was necessarily this immense blot! Yes, worse than 
Hudson Lowe. Hudson Lowe was only a gaoler,—Hud- 
son Lowe was only an executioner. The man who really 
assassinates Napoleon is Louis Bonaparte: Hudson Lowe 
only killed his life ; Louis Bonaparte kills his glory. Ah, 
the miserable man ! he takes everything, he uses everything, 
he soils everything, he dishonors everything. He chooses 
for his ambush the month, the day, of Austerlitz. He re- 
turns from Satory as one returns from Aboukir. He makes 
I know not what night-bird issue from the 2d December 
and perch upon the flag-staff of France, and he says: 
‘‘Soldiers! there is the eagle.” He borrows Napoleon's 
hat and Murat’s plume. He has his own imperial etiquette, 
his own chamberlains, his aids-de-camp, his courtiers. 
Under the emperor they were kings; under him they are 
lackeys. He has his policy all to himself; he has his own 


Napoleon the Little. 175 


13th of Vendemaire, he has his own 18th Brumaire, all! to 
himself. He compares himself with his uncle. At the 
Elysée Napoleon the Great has disappeared, they say ; the 
uncle Napoleon, the man of destiny, has outdone Géronte.* 
The complete one is not the first, it is this one. It is evi- 
dent that the first did not come except to make the bed 
for the second. Louis Bonaparte, surrounded with valets 
and mistresses, desecrates, to satisfy the wants of his table 
and alcove, coronation, consecration, the Legion of Honor, 
the Camp of Boulogne, the Column Vendéme, Lodi, 
Arcola, Saint Jean-d’Arc, Eylau, Friedland, Champaubert. 
. . . . Ah, Frenchmen! look at this swine, covered 
with mire, who is wallowing in the skin of a lion! 


a. . . . 
* A type of pretentious insignificance. 


BOOK FIFTH.—PARLIAMENTARISM. 





Gel Be 20) hd Sa ip 


One day, sixty-three years ago, the French people—pos- 
sessed by one family for eight hundred years ; oppressed by 
the barons up to the time of Louis XI., and since Louis XI. 
by the parliaments, that is to say, to employ the just expres- 
sion of a great lord of the eighteenth century, ‘‘ Eaten first by 
the wolves and then by the lice ;’ penned up in provinces, 
in castellaries, in generalities, in bailliwicks, and in the 
jurisdictions of seneschals; worked, pressed, taxed, cut, 
skinned, shorn, shaved, clipped, and villified at will; fined 
indefinitely at the good pleasure of the masters ; governed, 
led, driven, foundered, dragged, tortured ; beaten with rods 
and branded with hot irons for a false oath ; sent to the 
galleys for a rabbit killed on the lands of the king ; hung 
for five sous; furnishing their millions to Versailles and 
their skeletons to Montfaucon ; leaded with prohibitions, 
regulations, with patents, with letters royal, with edicts 
pecuniary and rural, with laws, with codes, with customs ; 
crushed by duties on salt, by aides, by quit-rents, by 
mort-mains, by excises, by dues, by tithes, by tolls, by 
duty-labor, by bankruptcies; clubbed with a stick that 
they call scepter ; sweating, panting, whining, always walk- 


Napoleon the Little. 177 


ing, crowned, but at the knees ; in short, more a beast than 
a nation—suddenly held themselves up, wished to become 
men, and took into their heads to demand accounts from 
the monarchy, to ask accounts from Providence, and to 
settle for these eight centuries of misery. It was a great 


effort. 
gx 


CALA Pal ER alds 


Tuey chose a vast hall, which they surrounded with seats 
raised in rows above each other, and then they took planks, 
and with these planks they built in the middle of the hall a 
kind of platform. When the platform was made, what they at 
that time called the nation—that is to say, the clergy in red 
and violet surplices, the nobility in white plumes and with 
swords at their sides, the bourgeoisie dressed in black— 
came to sit on these steps. Scarcely were they seated before 
they saw an extraordinary figure ascend the platform and 
there stand erect. ‘‘ What is this monster?” said some. 
“What is this giant?” said others. It was a singular 
being, unexpected, unknown, suddenly emerging from the 
darkness, and struck with fear and fascinated all. A hideous 
disease had given him a sort of tiger’s head; all the ugli- 
nesses seemed to have been deposited on this mask by all 
the vices. He was, like the bourgeoisie, dressed in black— 
that is to say, in mourning. His lifeless eye cast dimness 
on the assembly. He resembled reproach or menace. All 
viewed him with a sort of curiosity mingled with horror. 
He raised his hand: they were silent. Then they heard 
come out of that face a sublime voice. It was the voice of 
the new world which spoke by the mouth of the old world. 
It was ’89 who raised itself erect, and which summoned, 
and accused, and denounced, before God and man, all the 
fatal dates of monarchy. It was the past, august sight; the 
past, bruised with chains, marked on the shoulder, a worn- 


Napoleon the .sittle. 179 


out slave, an old galley-slave, the unfortunate past, which 
was calling with great cries for the future, the liberating fu- 
ture. That is what this unknown man was, that is what 
he was doing on that platform. 

At his speech, which at moments was a thunder, preju- 
dices, fictions, abuses, superstitions, errors, intolerance, 
ignorance, infamous exactions, barbarous penalties, decrepid 
authorities, worm-eaten magistracies, worn-out codes, rotten 
laws—all that was to perish, was seized with trembling and 
began to crumble. ‘That formidable apparition left a name 
in the memory of men ; they ought to have called it the 
Revolution : they call it Mirabeau, 


CHAPTER Itt 


From the day wken that man put foot on that platform, 
that platform was transfigured. The French tribune was 
founded. 

The French tribune! It would require a book to say 
what that word contains, The French tribune has been for 
sixty years the open mouth of the human mind: of the 
human mind saying everything, mingling everything, com- 
bining everything, making everything fruitful, things good, 
things evil ; the true, the false, the just, the unjust, the high, 
the low, the horrible, the beautiful, the dream, the fact ; pas- 
sion, reason, love, hatred; the material, the ideal, but, in 
short, for this is its sublime and eternal work, making night 
in order to draw out of it day, making chaos to draw out of 
it life, making revolution to draw out of it the Republic. 
What has passed on that tribune, what it has seen, what it 
has done, what tempests have assailed it, what events it has 
given birth to, what men have shaken it with their clamors, 
what men have sanctified it with their speech how can one 
recount, after Mirabeau,—Vergniaud, Camille Desmoulins, 
Saint Just, that severe young man, Danton, that heinous 
tribune, Robespierre, that incarnation of the immense and 
terrible year? There one has heard some of those wild in- 
terruptions: ‘‘Ah, then, you!” exclaims an orator of the 
Convention, ‘‘are you going to cut short my speech to- 


Napoleon the Little. 181 


day?” ‘* Yes,” answers a voice, ‘‘and your neck to-mor- 
row.” And those superb apostrophes! “ Minister of Jus- 
tice,” said General Foy to an iniquitous keeper of the seals, 
«‘T condemn you as you go out of this precinct and look 
at the statue of l’H6pital!”* There everything has been 
pleaded, we have just said: evil causes as well as good 
ones, —the good only have been gained definitively. There, 
in presence of resistances, of denials, of obstacles, those 
who wish the future as those who wish the past have lost 
patience ; there, it has happened to the truth to become vio- 
lent and to the lie to become furious; there, all extremes 
have arisen. At this tribune the guillotine has had its 
orator, Marat, and the inquisition its own, Montalembert. 
Terrorism in the name of public saftey, terrorism in the 
name of Rome; gall in the two mouths, anguish in 
the audience. When one spoke, you expected to see the 
gleam of the knife; when the other spoke, you thought 
you heard the crackle of the wood-pile. There, parties 
have fought, all with rancor, a few with glory. There, 
the royal power violated the popular right in the person of 
Manuel, become august in the eyes of history by this vio- 
lation. There, appeared, disdaining the past which they 
served, two melancholy old men—Royer Callard, haughty 
worth ; Chateaubriand, bitter genius. There, Thiers, 
shrewdness, has striven against Guizot, strength, there, 
they have closed, they have grappled, they have fought, 
they have worked evidence like a sword. There, during 
more than a quarter ofa century, hatreds, excitements, super- 
stitions, egotisms, impostures, howling, whistling, barking, 





* Statue of Justice. 


182 Napoleon the Little. 


standing up erect, twisting themselves, crying always the 
same calumnies, showing always the same closed fist, spit- 
ting since Christ the same saliva, have gone on eddying like 
a storm-cloud around thy calm face, Truth! 


CHAPTER TV. 


Att that was living, ardent, fruitful, tumultuous, grand. 
And when all had been pleaded, debated, examined, dug 
into, penetrated, said, contradicted, what would issue from 
the clash? Always the spark. What would issue from the 
cloud? Always light. All that the tempest could do was 
to agitate, shake the ray, and change it into lightning. 
There they have laid down, analyzed, thrown light upon, 
and almost always settled questions—questions of finance, 
questions of credit, questions on labor, questions on circu- 
lation, questions on salaries, questions of State, questions 
of territory, questions of peace, questions of war. There 
they have pronounced, for the first time, those words which 
contained an entire new society—the rights of man! There 
one has heard resounding for fifty years the anvil on which 
superhuman forgers were forging pure ideas ; ideas, those 
swords of the people, those lances of justice, those weapons 
of the right: There penetrated suddenly by sympathetic 
emotions, as live coals grow red in the wind, all those who 
have a hearth within their natures, mighty advocates like 
Ledru-Rollin and Berryer, great historians like Guizot, 
great poets like Lamartine, found themselves instantly and 
naturally great orators. That tribune was a place of force 
and of virtue. It lived, it inspired; for men thoroughly 
believe that these emanations issued from it, and 
all devotedness, all self-denial, all energies, all intrepid: 


184 Napoleon the Little. 


instincts. As for us, we honor all courage, even in the 
ranks opposed to us. 

One day the tribune was enveloped in darkness; it 
seemed as if the abyss had opened around it. One heard 
in this darkness something like the roaring of a sea, and 
suddenly, in this livid night, at this edge of marble which 
the strong hand of Danton was clutching, they saw appear 
a pike with a bleeding head upon it. Boissy D’Anglas 
saluted it. That day was a menacing day; but the people 
do not overthrow the tribunes ; the tribune belongs to it, 
and it knows it. Place a tribune in the center of the world 
and, before long, at the four corners of the earth, the Re- 
public will arise, The tribune beams for the people; they 
are not ignorant of it. Sometimes the tribune provokes _ 
them, and makes them foam; they strike her with their 
wave, and even cover her, as on the 15th of May, and then 
they retire majestically, like the ocean, and leave her stand- 
ing like the lighthouse. Overthrow the tribune when one 
is the people! It is folly, it is not a paying business, 
except for tyrants. 

The people rose up, were irritated, were indignant. A cer- 
tain generous error had seized them, a certain delusion was 
leading them astray ; they were mistaken on a fact, onan act, 
ona measure, on a law ; they grew angry; they abandoned 
that superb calm in which their strength lay ; they rushed 
upon the public squares with a deep, rumbling sound anda 
terrible spring. It was a riot, an insurrection, civil war ; 
a revolution, perhaps. The tribune was there. A be- 
loved voice arose, and said to the people: ‘* Pause, look, 
listen, judge! Sv forte virum quem conspexere, silent ; this 
was true in Rome, and it was true also in Paris.” The 


Napoleon the Little. 185 


people paused. O tribune! pedestal of strong men! from 
thence came eloquence, law, authority, patriotism, devot- 
edness, and great thoughts; bridles for the people, muz- 
zles for lions. In sixty years, every kind of mind, every 
variety of intelligence, every species of genius have suc- 
cessively had the floor in this place—the most resonant 
on earth. From the first Constituent Assembly to 
the last, from the first legislative body to the last, 
across the convention, the councils, and the chambers, 
count the men, if you can! It isan Homeric enumera- 
tion. What figures contrast between Danton and Thiers! 
What figures which resemble each other, from Barrére to 
Baroche, between Lafayette and Cavaignac! To the names 
which we have already mentioned, Mirabeau, Vergniaud, 
Danton, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille, Desmoulins, 
Manuel, Foy, Royer-Collard, Chateaubriand, Thiers, Gui- 
zot, Ledru-Rollin, Berryer, Lamartine, add these other 
names, different, perhaps their enemies, savants, artists, 
statesmen, military men, lawyers, democrats, monarchists, 
liberals, socialists, republicans, all famous; a few illus- 
trious, having each his own halo: Barnave, Cazalés, 
Maury, Mounier, Thouret, Chapelier, Pétion, Buzot, Bris- 
sot, Sieyés, Condorcet, Chenier, Carnot, Lanjuinais, Pon- 
técoulant, Cambacérés, Talleyrand, Fontanes, Benjamin 
Constant, Casimir Périer, Chauvelin, Voyer d’Argenson, 
Lafitte, Dupont (from |’Eure), Camille, Jordan, Lainé, 
Fitz-James, Bonald, Villéle, Martignac, Cuvier, Villemain, 
the two Lameths, the two Davids—the painter in ’93, the 
sculptor in ’48, Lamarque, Mauguin, Odilon Barrot, 
Arago, Garnier-Pagés, Louis Blanc, Mark Dufraisse, Lam- 
menais, Emile de Girardin, Lamoriciére, Dufaure, Crém- 


186 Napoleon the Little. 


mieux, Michel (from Bourges), Jules Favre. . . . What 
talents! What varied powers of adaptation! What ser- 
vices rendered! What struggles of all realities against all 
errors! What brains at work! What expense to the 
advantage of progress, of knowledge, of philosophy, of 
passion, of conviction, of experience, of sympathy, of elo- 
quence! What prolific warmth spent! What an immense 
train of light! And we do not name them all. To make 
use of an expression which they borrow sometimes from 
the author of this book: ‘‘ We have passed by some and 
better ones.” We have not mentioned even that valiant 
legion of young orators who have risen upon the left in 
these late years: Arnauld (from l’Ariége), Bancel, Chauf-~ 
four, Pascal Duprat, Esquiros, de Flotte, Farcounet, Vic- 
tor Hennequin, Madier Montjau, Morellet, Noél Parfait, 
Pelletier, Sain, Versigny. Let us dwell uponthem. Beginning 
with Mirabeau, there was in the world, in human society, in 
civilization, a culminating point, a central place, a hearth, 
asummit. This summit was the tribune of France; ad- 
mirable guiding-mark for the generations in their march, 
dazzling peak in peaceful times, beacon in the obscurity of 
catastrophes. From the opposite ends of the intelligent 
universe, the nations fixed their gaze on this height from 
which the human mind sent out its rays’; when any sudden 
darkness enveloped them, they heard a great voice coming 
thence which spoke to them in the shadow: “ Admonet et 
magna, testatur voce per umbras.” A voice which suddenly, 
when the hour had come, a cock-crowing announcing the 
day, the cry-of-the-eagle calling to the sun, sounded likea 
clarion of war or a trumpet of judgment, and made those 
heroic dead nations, —Poland, Hungary, Italy, stand erect, 


Napoleon the Little. 187 


shake off their grave-clothes, and search for swords in their 
sepulchers! Then, at this voice of France, the splendid 
heaven of the future opened, the old blind and terrifying 
despotisms bent their foreheads into the darkness below, 
and one saw appear, with her feet upon the cloud, with 
her forehead amongst the stars, with her flaming sword 
in her hand, and with her great wings stretched into the 
open azure, Liberty, archangel of nations ! 


CHAP aa Ka Ne 


Tuts tribune was the terror of all tyrannies and of all 
fanaticisms, and the hope of every one who was oppressed 
under heaven. Whoever put foot on this summit felt dis- 
tinctly the pulsation of the great heart of humanity. There, 
provided that he was a willing man, his soul grew great 
within him and cast its beams without him ; something uni- 
versal took possession of him and filled his mind as the 
blast fills the sail ; as soon as he stood on those four planks 
he was stronger and better, he felt himself in this sacred 
minute live the collective life of nations; there came to 
him good words for all men ; he perceived on the other side 
of the assembly grouped at his feet, and often full of emo- 
tion, the people attentive, serious, with ear stretched and with 
fingers on their lips; and on the other side of the people, 
the human race thoughtful, seated in a circle and listening. 
Such was this grand tribunal, from the height of which a 
man spoke to the world. 

From this tribune, ceaselessly in vibration, sorts of sono- 
rous waves were departing, immense oscillations of feeling 
and ideas, which, wave on wave, and from people to peo- 
ple, went to the confines of the earth and aroused those 
intelligent billows called human souls. Often one did not 
know why a certain law, a certain structure, a certain insti- _ 
tution, tottered yonder, further than the frontiers, further 
than the seas: the papacy on the other side of the Alps, 
the throne of the czar at the end of Europe, slavery in 
Ameri¢a, the death-penalty everywhere. The tribune of 


Napoleon the Lithe. 189 


France had started! At certain hours a start of this tri- 
bune was a trembling of the earth. The tribune of France 
spoke: everybody who thinks here below closely concen- 
trated his attention ; the words spoken went away into ob- 
scurity, across space, at hazard, it made no difference where. 
“Tt was only wind—it was only sound,” said barren minds, 
which live on irony ; and the next day, or three months 
afterward, or a year later, something fell on the surface 
of the globe, or something rose, ‘‘ Who did that?” This 
noise that had vanished, this wind which had passed. 
That noise, that wind, was the Word. A sacred force. 
From the Word of God the creation issued ; from the word 
of man the social order of peoples. 


CHAPTER Vr 


OncrE mounted on this tribune, the man who was there 
was no longer a man—he was that mysterious worker which 
one sees in the evening, at twilight, walking with great 
steps in the furrows, and launching into space, with a ges- 
ture of command, the germs, the seeds, the future harvest, 
the riches of the next summer, bread of life. 

He goes, he comes, he returns; his hand opens and 
shuts, fills and empties. The somber plain is stirred, deep 
nature opens, the unknown abyss of creation commences 
its labor, the dews, in suspense, descend ; the sprig of fool- 
ish oats shivers, and thinks that the ear of wheat will suc- 
ceed it; the sun, hidden behind the horizon, likes what 
man does, and knows that his rays will not be lost. Holy 
and marvelous work ! 

The orator is the sower. He takes in his heart his in- 
stincts, his passions, his beliefs, his sufferings, his dreams, 
his ideas, and casts them in handfuls in the midst of men. 
Every brain is a furrow to him. A word fallen from the 
tribune always takes root somewhere, and becomes a thing. 
You say: ‘‘It is nothing: it isa man who is speaking ;” 
and you raise yourshoulders. Short-sighted minds! It is 
a future which is germinating—it is a world which is break- 
ing the shell. 


‘CEPA? TER © Vil 


Two great problems are pending on the world: war 
ought to disappear and conquest ought to continue. These 
two necessities of increasing civilization seem to exclude 
one another. How satisfy one without extinguishing the 
other? Who could resolve these two problems at once? 
What did resolve them? The tribune. The tribune is 
peace and the tribune is conquest. Conquest by the sword ! 
who wishes any? No one: the peoples are countries. 
Conquests by ideas! who wishes them? The world: the 
peoples are humanity. 

Now, two brilliant tribunes ruled the nations: the English 
tribune attending to business, and the French tribune cre- 
ating ideas. ‘The French tribune had elaborated since ’89 
all the principles which make up the essence of politics, and 
she had commenced to elaborate since 1848 all the princi- 
ples which constitute the essence of the social order. A 
principle once drawn from limbus and brought out into the 
light, it cast it to the world armed at all points, and said to 
it: ‘‘Go!” The conquering principle entered the open 
country, met the custom-house officers at the frontiers, and 
passed in spite of the watch-dogs ; met the sentinels at the 
gates of the cities, and passed in spite of the instructions ; 
took the railroad, went on board the packet, wandered over 
the continent, crossed the sea, overtook the travelers on the 
high-roads, sat down at the hearths of families, slid between 
friend and friend, between brother and brother, between 


192 Napoleon the Little. 


man and wife, between master and slave, between people 


and king ; and to those who asked it: “ What are you ie 
it answered: ‘‘I am Truth!” and to those who asked 
it: ‘‘From whence came you?” it answered: ‘‘ From 


France.” Then the man who had asked the questions held 
out his hand to it, and it was better than a province,—it 
was an intelligence annexed. From this time forth, be- 
tween Paris, the metropolis, and this man isolated in his 
solitude, and this city lost in the depths of woods or on 
table-lands, and this people bowed down under the yoke, 
a current of thought and of love was established. Under 
the influence of these currents, certain nationalities were 
growing feeble, certain were growing strong and were ris- 
ing. The savage felt himself less savage, the Turk less 
Turk, the Russian less Russian, the Hungarian more Hun- 
garian, the Italian more Italian. Slowly and by degrees 
the French mind, furthering the universal progress, was 
assimilating the nations to itself. 

Thanks to this admirable French language, composed 
by Providence, with a marvellous balance, having conso- 
nants enough to be pronounced by the peoples of the 
north, and vowels enough to be pronounced by the peoples 
of the south ; thanks to this language, which is one of the 
powers of civilization and humanity ; little by little, and 
by its own light alone, this high, central tribunal of Paris 
was conquering the peoples and making them France. The 
material frontier of France did what it could; but there 
were no treaties of 1815 for the moral frontier. The moral 
frontier was retiring ceaselessly, and was going on enlarging 
wSself day by day ; and before a quarter of a century, 


Napoleon the Little. 193 


perhaps, they would have said of the French world what 
they said of the Roman world. 

This is what the tribune was. This is what it did for 
France: a prodigious lobby of ideas, a gigantic apparatus of 
civilization, continually raising the level of intelligence in 
the entire universe, and setting free, into the midst of hu- 
manity, an enormous quantity of light. It is this which 
M. Bonaparte has suppressed. 


9 


CHAP WT Ee Vial oe, 


Yes, M. Bonaparte has overthrown this tribune. This 
power, created by the pains of our great revolutionary la- 
bours, he has broken, ground, crushed; he has torn it at the 
points of his bayonets, trodden it under the feet of his horses. 
His uncle uttered an aphorism : “The throne is a plank coy- 
ered with velvet;” he has uttered his: “ The tribune is a 
plank covered with a cloth, on which one reads: Aderty, 
equality, fraternity.” We has thrown the plank, and the 
cloth, and the liberty, and the equality, and the fraternity 
into the bivouac fire. A shout of laughter from the soldiers, 
a little smoke, and the story is told. Is it true? Is it pos- 
sible? Did it come to pass in this way?* Has such a 
thing actually happened? To cut off Cicero’s head and 
to nail his two hands on the rostrum, took one brute who 
had an axe and another who had nails and a hammer. 

The tribune was three things for France: a means of 
exterior initiation ; a method of interior government; a 
glory. 

Louis Bonaparte has suppressed initiation. France was 
teaching the peoples, and conquering them by love. What 
was the use of it? He has suppressed the method of govern- 
ment—-his own is of more value. He has breathed upon 
the glory and extinguished it; certain breaths have this 
property. Nevertheless, to make an attempt upon the 
tribune is a crime in the family. The first Bonaparte had 


Napoleon the Little. 195 


already committed it, but the glory which he brought to 
France to replace it, was at least glory, not ignominy. 
Louis Bonaparte is not satisfied with overthrowing the 
tribune, he has made it ridiculous. It is an effort, 
like the other. It is indeed the lesser, when one cannot 
say two words together, when one only harangues with 
the copy-book in one’s hand, when one is a stammerer in: 
speech and intelligence, let him make a little fun of 
Mirabeau! General Ratapoil says to General Foy: 
‘*Hold your tongue, babbler! What is that,—the tri- 
bune?” Exclaims M. Bonaparte—Louis : ‘‘ That is ‘ parlia- 
mentarism !” What’s that you say about parliamentarism ? 
Parliamentarism pleases me. Parliamentarism is a pearl.” 
The dictionary is enriched. This academician of the coup 
d’état makes words. It is a fact, one is not a barbarian for 
nothing. One will let drop a barbarism from time to 
time. He also is a sower; that sprouts in the brain. 
of the silly. The uncle had his ‘‘ideologists.” The 
nephew has ‘‘parliamentarists.” Parliamentarism, gen- 
tlemen; parliamentarism, ladies. That answers for 
everything. You hazard this timid observation: ‘It is 
perhaps sad, that one has ruined so many families, trans- 
ported so many men, proscribed so many citizens, filled so 
many hand-barrows, dug so many graves, shed so much 
blood, . . . .” ‘Ah, indeed,” replies a coarse voice, 
with a Dutch accent, “you regret, then, the ‘ parliamenta- 
rism?’ Stand aside, parliamentarism is a God-send. I 
give my vote to M. Louis Bonaparte for the first arm-chair 
vacant at the institute. What! One must encourage 
this science of coining. This man issues from the charnel- 
house, he comes out of the morgue; this man with his 


196 Napoleon the Little. 


hands smoking like a butcher—he scratches his ear, smiles, 
and invents terms like Julia d’Angennes. He marries the 
mind of the Hétel de Rambouillet to the odour of Mont- 
faucon. Itisa rare gem. We shall both vote for him: 
Shall we not, Monsieur de Montalembert ?” 


CHAPTER, IX 


THEN ‘‘parliamentarism”—that is to say, the security 
of citizens, the liberty of discussion, the liberty of the 
press, individual liberty, the scrutiny of taxes, transparency 
in the receipts and expenses, the safety-lock of the public 
strong-box, the right to know what they do with your 
money, the firmness of credit, the liberty of conscience, 
the freelom of worship, the security of property, the appeal 
against confiscations and unjust exactions, the security of 
the individual, which is the counterpoise to arbitrary 
power; the dignity of the nation and the splendour of 
France, the robust morals of free peoples, public initiative, 
movement, life,—all thatisnomore. Effaced—annihilated 
—vanished! And this deliverance has only cost France 
something like twenty-five millions, divided among fifteen 
or twenty saviours, and forty thousand francs’ worth of brandy 
for each brigade! Certainly it was not dear; these gentle- 
men of the coup d’état have done the thing at a discount. 
To-day it is done—it is perfect—it is complete. The grass 
is sprouting at the Bourbon palace. A virgin forest is com- 
mencing to grow; between the Bridge of Concord and 
Bourgogne square one sees in the brushwood the sentry- 
box of the sentinel. The Corps Legislatif pours out its urn 
into the reeds, and glides to the feet of that sentry-box 
with a sweet murmur. To-day, it has ended. The great 
work is finished. And the result of the thing? Do you 
know that Messrs. So-and-so have built city-houses and 


198 Napoleon the Little. 


country-houses simply on what they made on the belt rail- 
road ? 

Attend to business, take your ease, and get stomach. It 
is no longer the question how to be a great people, how to 
be a powerful people, how to be a free nation, how to 
be a hearth shedding light. France no longer has an 
eye single to that. There is a success. France votes 
Louis Napoleon, carries Louis Napoleon, fattens Louis 
Napoleon, views Louis Napoieon, admires Louis 
Napoleon—and stupidly stops here. The end of civiliza- 
tion is attained. To-day, no more noise, no more hub- 
bub, no more talk, parliament or parliamentarism: The 
Corps Legislatif, the Senate, the Council of State, are 
mouths sewed up. One has no longer to fear reading an 
able piece in the morning on waking. It’s all up with the 
man who thought, who reflected, with the man who created, 
with the man who spoke, with the man who shone, with 
the man who was the centre of splendour in this great 
people. Courage, Frenchmen! Hold up your heads, 
Frenchmen! You~are no longer anything; this man is 
everything. He holds your intelligence in his hand as a 
child holds a bird; the moment he pleases he will wring 
the genius of France’s neck. It would be one hubbub 
the less. In the meanwhile—let us repeat it in chorus 
—‘‘No more parliamentarism! no more tribune!” In- 
stead of all these great voices which were dialogueing 
for the enlightenment of the world, which were one 
idea; another fact, another right, another justice, another 
glory, another faith, another hope, another science, another 
genius, which were instructing, which were charming, 
which were reassuring, which were consoling, which were 


Napoleon the Little. 199 


encouraging, which were fertilizing,—instead of all these 
sublime voices, what is this which you hear in this black 
night which covers France? the noise of a spur which jingles 
and of sabre which trails on the pavement. ‘‘ Hallelujah !” 
says M. Sibour ; ‘‘ Hosannah !” responds M. Parisis. 


BOOK SIXTH.—THE ABSOLUTION. 





CE APPLE R yt. 


THE FIRST FORM OF ABSOLUTION: THE 7,500,000 VOTES. 


Tuey tell us : ‘‘ You do not consider ! All these acts which 
you call crimes are henceforth ‘acts accomplished,’ and 
in consequence respectable. All has been accepted, 
all has been adopted, legitimized, covered up, absolved. 
Accepted ! adopted ! legitimized! covered up! absolved !” 
By what? By a vote. What vote? The seven million 
five hundred thousand votes! Actually. There has been 
a plebiscite, and a vote, and 7,500,000 yeas. Let us say 
a word about it. 


CHAPTER 11, 


A BRIGAND stops a stage-coach at the corner of a wood. 
He is at the head of a determined band. The travellers 
are more numerous, but they are separated, disunited, 
penned up in the compartments, half asleep, surprised in 
the middle of the night, suddenly seized, and without arms, 
The brigand orders them to get out, not to utter a cry or 
breathe a word, and to lie down with their faces to the 
ground. A few resist,—he blows out their brains. The 

thers obey, and lie down on the pavement, silent, motion- 
less, terrified, pell-mell with the dead, and as helpless as the 
dead. The brigand, while his accomplices put their feet 
on their backs, and hold their pistols at their temples, 
rifles their pockets, forces their trunks, and takes every 
valuable that they have. The pockets empty, the trunks 
pillaged, the coup d’état finished, he says to them: ‘‘ Now, 
‘in order to put myself in line with justice, I have written 
‘*on a paper that you acknowledge that all that I have 
‘‘taken from you belongs to me, and that you yield it to 
‘*me of your own free will. I mean that this should be 
‘your legal statement, They are going to place in the 
‘‘ hand of each of you a pen, and without saying a word, 
‘* without making a gesture, without quitting the position in 
‘* which you are, with your belly on the ground, and with 
‘“your faces in the mud, you will stretch out your rght 
‘* hands and you will all sign this paper. If any one budges 


202 Napoleon the Little. 


‘‘ or speaks, here is the mouth of my pistol. But, however, 
‘‘ you are free.” The travellers stretch out their hands and 
sign. That done, the brigand lifts up his head and says: 
‘«T have seven million five hundred thousand votes.” 


CHAP hE R (VE 


M. Louis Bonaparte is the president of that stage-coach. 
Let us recall a few principles. In order that a political 
ballot may be valid, three conditions are absolutely neces- 
sary. First, that the vote should be free ; second, that the 
vote should be enlightened ; and third, that the returns 
should be genuine. If one of these three conditions is 
wanting the ballot is void. What will be the case if the 
whole three at once are absent? Let us apply these rules. 
First, that the vote be free. What was the freedom of the 
vote of the 20th December? We have just described it; 
we have expressed this liberty by a striking figure. We 
might spare ourselves the pains of adding anything to it. 
Let every one of those who voted try to recollect, and ask 
himself under what moral and material violence he de- 
posited his ballot in the box. We could cite such a dis- 
trict as that of Yonne, where out of five hundred heads of 
families four hundred were arrested, and the rest voted 
“*ves ;” such a district as that of Loiret, where, out of six 
hundred and thirty-nine heads of families, four hundred 
and ninety-seven were arrested or banished ; the one hun- 
dred and forty-two who escaped voted ‘‘yes.” And what we 
say of Yonneand Loiret we must say of all the departments, 
From the 2d of December every city had its swarm of 
spies ; every town, every village, every hamlet had its infor- 
mer. To vote ‘‘no” was prison, or exile, or Lambessa. 


204 Napoleon the Little. 


In the villages of a certain department they carried to the 
doors of the mayoralties (an eye-witness told us) ass-loads 
of affirmative votes. The mayors, flanked by the rural 
guards, sent them back to the peasants. ‘They had to vote. 
At Savigny, near Saint Maur, on the morning of the vote, 
the enthusiastic gendarmes declared that the man who 
voted ‘‘no” should not sleep in his bed. The gendarmes 
entered on the gaoler’s book, in the station-house of Va- 
lenciennes, M. Parent, junior, substitute of the justice of 
the peace of the district of Bouchain, for having induced 
the inhabitants of Avesne-le-Sec to vote ‘‘no.” The 
nephew of the representative Aubry (from Nord), having 
seen aftirmative votes distributed by agents of the prefect in 
the great square of Lille, went down on that square the 
next day and distributed negative votes; he was arrested 
and sent to the citadel. As to the vote of the army, a part 
voted in their own interest. The rest followed mechanically. 

As to the freedom of even this vote of the soldiers let us 
hear the army itself speak. Here is what a soldier of the 
6th of the line, commanded by Colonel Garderens de 
Boisse, wrote: ‘‘ For the company the vote was a roll-call. 
‘« The sub-officers, the corporals, the drummers, and the 
‘* soldiers, placed in rank according to the roll, were called 
‘“by the quarter-master, in the presence of the colonel, 
‘“ the lieutenant-colonel, the chief of battalion, and of the 
‘‘ officers of the company, and the exact moment each 
‘“man called answered ‘present,’ his name was written 
‘* down by the sergeant-major. The colonel said, rubbing 
‘“his hands, ‘Faith, gentlemen, this goes swimmingly.’ 
‘“ When a corporal of the company to which I belonged 
‘“approached the table where the sergeant-major was 


Napoleon the Little. 205 


‘* sitting, and begged him to give him the pen that he 
‘* might with his own hand write his name on the negative 
‘‘ register, which was*to have remained blank, ‘What !’ 
‘‘cried the colonel, ‘you who are proposed for quarter- 
‘« master, you who are going to be named for the first 
‘* vacancy, you formally disobey your colonel, and that 
‘‘before your company! Yet, if this refusal that you 
‘‘ make at this moment were only an act of insubordina- 
‘tion, it would be bad enough; but you do not know, 
‘‘ wretch, that by your vote you are asking for the destruc- 
‘“ tion of the army, the burning of your father’s house, the 
‘* entire annihilation of society ! You are putting your hand 
**to a dirty trick? What! X 
‘* push forward, you come to-day to tell me such a thing as 





! you whom I want to 


‘‘that?? The poor devil, as one might well know, let 
‘‘ himself be written down like the others.” 

Multiply this colonel by six thousand, and you have the 
pressure brought to bear by the functionaries of all orders 
—military, political, civil, administrative, ecclesiastical, 
judiciary, of the customs, municipal, educational, com- 
mercial, consular, throughout France, all bearing upon the 
soldier, the citizen, and the peasant. Add,.as we have 
already indicated above, the false jacquerie reported of the 
districts and the real Bonapartist terrorism, the government 
weighing heavily, by hideous delusions, on the feeble, 
and by dictatorship on the refractory, and setting in motion 
two terrors at once; and we have the truth. It would re- 
quire a separate volume to recount, expose, and sift to the 
bottom the innumerable details of that immense extortion 
of signatures that they call the vote of the 20th of December. 
The vote of the 20th of December has thrown the honour, 


206 Napoleon the Little. 


the originality, the intelligence, and the moral life of the 
nation to the earth. France went to this vote as the herd 
goes to the slaughter. Let us pass on. 

Secondly : That the vote should be enlightened. Here 
is a first principle. Where there is no liberty of the press 
there isno vote. The liberty of the press is the condition, 
sine qua non of universal suffrage. A radical nullification 
of all ballotting takes place on the absence of the liberty 
of the press. That liberty involves as a necessary coral- 
lary the liberty of assemblage, of posting, and of canvassing; 
all liberties that right begets, and preliminary to all, the 
liberty of informing one’s self before voting. To vote is to 
govern and to judge. Imagine a blind pilot at the helm ; 
a judge with ears stopped up and with eyes put out. 
Liberty, then! Liberty to inform one’s self by every means, 
by inquiry, by the press, by speech, by discussion. This 
is the express guarantee and the vital condition of univer- 
sal suffrage. In order that a thing may be done validly it 
is necessary that it should be done knowingly. Where 
there is no light there is no act. These are axioms. Out- 
side of these axioms everything is null, ~so facto. Now, let 
us see; did M. Bonaparte, in his ballot of December 2oth, 
obey these axioms ; has he fulfilled these conditions of a 
free press, free assemblage, free discussion, free postage, free 
colportage, free inquiry? A great shout of laughter answers, 
even at the Elysée. So you are forced yourself to agree, 
that it is thus that they made use of ‘‘ universal suffrage.” 
What? I know nothing of what has happened! <They 
have killed, cut throats, mowed down men with grape-shot, 
assassinated, and I am ignorant of it! They have confis- 
cated, tortured, expelled, exiled, transported, and I scarcely 


Napoleon the Little. 207 


catch a glimpse of it! My mayor and my curate tell me: 
“Those people there, whom they are taking off bound with 
cords, are old offenders!” I am a peasant, I cultivate 
a corner of land at a remote point in a province; you 
‘suppress the journal ; you stifle the information as to what 
takes place; you hinder the truth from reaching me; and 
you make me vote! What? in the deepest night! while 
I am groping! you rush out abruptly from the dark, 
with a sabre in your hand, and you tell me: ‘‘ Vote!” 
and you call that a ballot. Certainly, a ballot ‘‘free and 
unsolicited,” say the sheets of the coup d’é:at. Every rakish 
trick has worked for that vote. A mayor of a village, a 
kind of Escobar wild stock, put out into open field, said 
to his peasants: ‘‘ If you vote yes, it is for the Republic ; if 
you vote no, it is against the Republic.” The peasants 
voted. And then let us bring to light another phase of this 
rascality, which they call the plebiscite of the z2oth of 
December. How was the question put? Was there any 
possible choice? Did they—and this was certainly the least 
that the man of the coup d’état ought to have done, in a 
ballot so strange as this, in which every great principle 
was put once more at stake—did they allow each party the 
chance to vote for its candidate? Did they permit the 
legitimists to make efforts in behalf of their exiled prince 
and the ancient honour of the Lilies? Were the Orleanists 
permitted to turn toward that proscribed family which the 
valiant services of two soldiers, Messrs. de Joinville and 
d’Aumale, have honoured, and which that grand soul, the 
Duchess of Orleans, renders illustrious? Did they offer 
to the people, who are not a party, but who are the people, 
that is to say, the sovereign, did they offer to them that true 


208 Napoleon the Little. 


Republic, before which all monarchy is vanishing as night 
vanishes before day ; that Republic which is the evident and 
irresistible future of the civilized world; the Republic 
without dictatorship ; the Republic of harmony, of science, 
and of liberty; the Republic of universal suffrage, of 
universal peace and welfare ; the initiatrix of peoples, and 
liberatrix of nationalities ; that Republic which, after all, in 
spite of all that they may do, will have, as the author of 
this book has elsewhere said, France to-morrow, Europe 
the day after? Did they offer that? No! Here is how 
M. Bonaparte presented the thing. There was in this ballot 
two candidates. The first, M. Bonaparte. The second, 
the Abyss. France has had to choose. Admire the 
address of the man, and also notice a little his humility: 
M. Bonaparte has given himself for opposite dancer in this 
cotillon, whom? M. deChambord? No. M. de Joinville? 
No. The Republic? Still less. M. Bonaparte, like those 
pretty creoles who set off their beauty by means of some 
frightful Hottentot, has given himself for competitor in 
election a phantom, a vision, a Nuremburg socialism, 
with teeth, and claws, and a coal of fire in its eyes; the 
ogre of Little Poucet, the vampire of St. Martin’s gate, 
the hydra of Théraméne, the great sea serpent of the Con- 
stitutionnel, which the shareholders have had the good grace 
to lend him ; the dragon of the Apocalypse, the Tarasque, * 
the Dree,* the Gra-Oulli,* a fright. Aided by a Rug- 
gieril, M. Bonaparte made on this pasteboard monster an 
effect of red Bengal fire, and said to the terrified voter : 
‘“There is nothing possible but this and me; choose!” 
He said, ‘‘Choose between beauty and the beast; the 


* Nursery horrors. 


Napoleon the Little. 209 


beast is communism, the beauty is my dictatorship. 
Choose! No alternative! nothing between society over- 
thrown, your house burned, your farm pillaged, your cow 
stolen, your field confiscated, your wife violated, your 
children butchered, your wine drunk by others, yourself 
eaten alive by those great open jaws which you see there, 
or me Emperor! Choose. Me or Croque-mitaine.”* The 
bourgeois, terrified, and in consequence a child; the 
peasant, ignorant, and in consequence a child; preferred 
M. Bonaparte to Croque-mitaine. That is his triumph. 
Let us say, however, that out of ten million voters it seems 
that two million five hundred thousand would have liked 
Croque-mitaine much better. After ail, M. Bonaparte has 
only had 7,500,000 votes then ; and in this way, freely, as 
is seen, knowingly as is seen, what M. Bonaparte has 
the goodness to call universal suffrage has voted. Voted 
what? The dictatorship, autocracy, servitude, the Republic 
hurried into a despotism, France made a dominion of the 
Pasha, chains on all hands, the seal on all lips, silence, 
degradation, fear, the spy the soul of all! They have given 
to a man—to you—omnipotence and omniscience! They 
have made of this man the constituent, the sole legislator, 
the alpha of right, the omega of power. They have 
decreed that he is Minos, that he is Numa, that he is Solon, 
that he is Lycurgus! They have incarnated the people 
in him and the nation, the state and the law, and for 
ten years! What, for me a citizen, to vote not only 
my own renunciation, my own overthrow, my own abdi- 
cation, but the abdication for ten years of the universal 
suffrage of new generations, over which I have no con- 


* Nursery horrors, 


210 Napoleon the Little. 


troul, whose rights you, a usurper, force me to usurp. A 
thing which, of itself, let it be said in passing, would suffice 
to strike with invalidity this monstrous ballot, if all nullifi- 
cations were not already heaped up and mingled in it! 
What! you make me do this, vote that all is over, that 
nothing now remains, that the people are negroes; you 
actually tell me, that seeing that you are sovereign, you are 
going to give yourself a master; seeing that you are 
France, you are going to become Hayti!* What abomin- 
able mockery ! 

That is the vote of the zoth of December, this sanc- 
tion, as M. de Morny says, this absolution, as M. Bonaparte 
declares. Truly, in a little time from now, in a year, in a 
month, in a week perhaps, when all that we now see shall 
have vanished, we shall be somewhat ashamed of having 
done it, be it only for a moment, this infamous counterfeit of 
a vote, which they called the vote of the seven million five 
hundred thousand, the honour of discussing it. It is, how- 
ever, the only foundation, the only prop, the only rampart, 
of the prodigious power of M. Bonaparte. This vote is the 
excuse of cowards, the buckler of dishonoured consciences. 
Generals, magistrates, bishops, all forfeitures, all prevarica- 
tions, all complicities in fraud shelter their baseness behind 
this vote. France has spoken ; say they: Vox populi, vox 
Det ; universal suffrage has voted ; all is covered by a ballot. 
That a vote! that a ballot! One spits on it and passes on. 

Thirdly : thatthe figures should be accurate. I admire that 
number, 7,500,000. It ought to have had a good effect 
that morning, through the fog, in letters of gold three feet 
high, over the front gate of Notre Dame. I admire that 





* An allusion to Soulouque, 


Napoleon the Little. 211 


number. Do you know why? Because it looks so modest. 
7,500,000! Why 7,500,000? That is few. No one 
used to refuse M. Bonaparte good measure. After what he 
had done on the 2d of December, he had a right to more. 
Truly, who would have cavilled at him? Who would have 
hindered him from putting down eight millions, ten mil- 
lions, a round number? As for myself, I was deceived in 
my hopes. I counted on a unanimous vote. Coup d’état, 
you are modest. What! they have done all that we have 
just recalled and recounted ; they took an oath, and they 
perjured themselves ; they were the guardians of the Con- 
stitution, and they destroyed it; they were the servants of 
a Republic, and they betrayed it; they were the agents of a 
sovereign assembly, and they violently broke it up; they 
have made of the military order a poignard to slay military 
honour; they have used the flag of France to wipe up mud 
and shame; they have handcuffed the African generals, 
made the representatives of the people travel in prison-car- 
riages ; they have filled Mazas, Vincennes, Mont Valerien, 
and St. Pelagie with inviolable men ; they have shot almost 
at the muzzles of their guns, on the righteous barricade, the 
legislator, clothed in that scarf which is a sacred and vener- 
able mark of the law ; they have given to a certain colonel 
whom we could name one hundred thousand francs to 
tread his duty under foot, and to each soldier ten francs a 
day; they spent in four days forty thousand francs for 
brandy on each brigade; they covered the carpet of the 
Elysée with the gold of the bank, and said to their friends : 
“‘Take it!” They murdered M. Adde in his own house, 
M. Belval in his own house, M. Debaecque, M. Labilte, M. 
de Couverselle, M. Monpelas, M. Thirion de Montauban, 


212 Napoleon the Little. 


each in his own house; they have slaughtered on the Boule- 
vards and elsewhere, shot one does not know where or whom: 
they have committed many murders, of which they have the 
modesty only to avow ninety-one; they have actually 
changed the pits of the Boulevard trees into basins full of 
blood ; they have shed the blood of the infant with the 
blood of the mother, and mingled with all the cham- 
pagne of the gendarmes ; they did all this and gave them- 
selves this trouble, and when they ask of the nation, ‘‘Are 
you satisfied,” they only get 7,500,000 yeas! Truly, the 
thing has not been paid for. 

Devote yourself then to saving a society! Ah, the ingrat- 
itude of nations! In fact, three millions of mouths have 
actually answered no! Who was it, then, who said that the 
savages of the South Sea called Frenchmen the Yes-yeses? 

Let us speak seriously, for irony drags heavily in these 
tragic matters. People of the coup d’état, nobody believes 
in your seventy-five hundred thousand votes. Stop, there 
is too much franchise, avow it. You have been a little 
Greek, you are cheating. In your balance of the 2d of De- 
cember you have counted too many votes and too fewcorpses ! 

Seven million five hundred thousand! What number 
is that? Where does it come from? Out of what does 
it issue? What do you want us to make of it? Shall we 
make it seven millions, eight millions, ten millions? What 
difference does it make? We yield you everything, and 
we contest everything. 

The seven millions you have, plus the five hundred 
thousand ; the main amount, plus the odd numbers ; you 
say it is so, prince ; you affirm it; you swear; but who 
proves it? Who counted the votes? Baroche. Who scru- 


Napoleon the Little. 213 


tinized the ballot? Rouher. Who registered it? Pietri. 
Who summed itup? Maupas. Who verified it? Trop- 
long. Who proclaimed it? You. That is to say, that 
baseness counted it, dullness scrutinized it, rakish trickery 
registered it, forgery added it, venality verified it, and false- 
hood proclaimed it. 

Well. 

On this M. Bonaparte goes up to the capitol, orders M. 
Sibour to thank Jupiter, puts a blue and gold livery on the 
Senate, a blue and silver one on the Corps Legislatif, green 
and gold on his coachman, lays his hand on his heart, 
declares that he is the fruit of ‘‘ universal suffrage,” and 
that his ‘‘ legitimacy” has come out of the ballot urn, That 
urn is a goblet. 


CHARTER wy. 


WE declare it then, purely and simply the 20th of Decem- 
ber, 1851, eighteen days after the 2d, M. Bonaparte poked 
his hand into the conscience of every man, and stole from 
each his vote. Others steal pocket-handkerchiefs ; he stole 
the empire. Every day, for just such pranks, a sergeant 
of police seizes a man by the nape of the neck, and takes 
him to the station-house. Let us be understood, however. 
Is what we have said as much as to say that we pretend that 
no one really voted for M. Bonaparte, or voluntarily said 
““Yes?” or freely and knowingly accepted the man? Far 
from it: M. Bonaparte had on his side the mob of office- 
holders, the twelve hundred thousand parasites of the 
budget, with their tenants and dependents ; he had the cor- 
rupt, the compromised, the cunning, and, at their backs, 
the idiots. A worthy mass! 

He had in his favour my lords the cardinals, the bishops, 
the canons, the curates, the vicars, the archdeacons, 
the deacons, the subdeacons, the prebendaries, the church- 
wardens, the sextons, the beadles, the porters of the parish, 
and the monastics—‘‘the men of religion,” as they are 
called. Yes, we do not make any difficulty in acknowledg- 
ing it, M. Bonaparte has had in his favour all the bishops 
who sign themselves after the style of Veuillot and Monta- 
lembert,* and all the ‘‘men of religion.” Precious race | 
old, but much recruited since the landlord terrors of 1848. 





* Two strong Catholics; the latter, Count Montalembert. 


Napoleon the Little. 215 


They are the kind of men who pray in these terms: ‘‘O 
my God! make the shares of Lyons go up.” ‘‘Sweet Lord 
Jesus, make me realize twenty-five per cent. on my Naples- 
Rothschild certificates.” ‘‘ Holy apostles, sell my wines.” 
‘‘ Blessed martyrs, double my governments.” ‘‘ Holy Mary, 
Mother of God, spotless Virgin, Star of the Sea, Garden 
enclosed, hortus conclusus, deign to cast a favourable eye 
on my little business, situated at the corner of Tirechappe 
and Quincampoix streets.” ‘‘ Tower of Ivory, make the 
shop opposite run down.” These voted really and incon- 
testably for M. Bonaparte: first class, the office-holder ; 
second, the fool; third, the Voltairian-landlord-manufac- 
turer-priest class. 

Let us own it: the mind of man, and the bourgeois in- 
tellect in particular, has singular puzzles. We know it, and 
we have no desire to hide it: from the shopkeeper to the 
banker, from the little tradesman to the exchange-broker, 
a good number of men of business and manufacturers in 
France—that is to say, a good number of those men who 
know perfectly well what a well-placed confidence is, a de- 
posit faithfully kept, a key placed in sure hands—voted, 
after the 2d of December, for M. Bonaparte. The vote ac- 
complished, you might have spoken to one of these busi- 
ness-men—the first you met, taken at hazard—and this is 
the dialogue that you would have exchanged with him :— 

‘You have nominated Louis Bonaparte President of the 
Republic?” 

Fh ee 

‘© Would you take him for your cash-boy ?” 

**Certainly not.” 


CHAPTER, Vv. 


Anp that is the ballot. Let us repeat it, and dwell on it, 
and not get tired. ‘cry a hundred times the same things,” 
says Isaiah, ‘‘2 order that they may hear once.” That thing 
there is the ballot, that is the plebiscite, that is the vote, that 
is the sovereign decree of ‘‘universal suffrage,” under 
the shadow of which these men who are holding France 
to-day shelter themselves, and out of which they make 
themselves titles of authority, and a diploma of govern- 
ment, while in the mean time they are commanding, and 
domineering, and judging, and reigning; their arms 
plunged to the elbows in gold, and their feet to the knees 
in blood. Now, and to make an end of it, let us make 
one concession to M. Bonaparte. No more quibbies. His 
ballot of the zoth of December was free, it was enlightened ; 
all journals printed what they pleased. Who has said the 
contrary? Slanderers! They opened the electoral assem- 
blages ; the walls disappeared, covered up with the posted 
notices ; the passers-by in Paris swept with their feet, on the 
Boulevards and in the streets, a snow-storm of election 
tickets—white, blue, yellow, red; they said what they 
wanted to say, wrote what they wished to write; the num- 
ber of votes is honestly returned. It was not Baroche who 
counted, it was Baréme. Louis Blanc, Guinard, Felix 
Pyat, Raspail, Caussidiere, Thoré, Ledru-Rollin, Stephen 
Arago, Albert, Barbés, Blanqui, and Gent, were the sifters 


Napoleon the Little. 217, 


of the votes. It was they who announced the seven million 
five hundred thousand votes. Be it so. We concede all 
that. But after that, what is the conclusion which the coup 
d'état makes of it? He rubs his hands and asks no more: 
that satisfies him. He supposes that all is hushed up and 
ended, and that he has nothing further to do—that he is 
‘*absolved.” 

Halt there ! 

The true vote, the genuine returns, that is not the critical 
side of the question. There remains the moral side. There 
is, then, a moral side? Yes, prince, and that is the true side, 
the great side. Let us examine it. 

IO 


CHAPTER VE 


Ir is necessary first, M. Bonaparte, that you should have 
some knowledge as to what the human conscience is. 
There are two things in this world ; learn this new idea ; and 
they call them good andevil. It is necessary that it should 
be revealed to you that to lie is not righteous, to betray is 
evil, to murder is worse. It isin vain that these are useful, 
they are forbidden. By whom? you will ask me. We 
shall explain it to you further on; but let us proceed. 
Man, know also this other peculiarity, is a thinking being, 
free in this world, to give account in the other. Strange 
thing, and one which will surprise you, he was not made 
only to enjoy, to satisfy every whim, to move at the chance im- 
pulse of his appetites, to crush whatever happens to be before 
him as he walks, sprig of herb, or oath sworn; nor to 
devour, whatever presents itself when he is hungry. Life 
is not his prey; for example, in order to pass from nothing 
a year to two hundred thousand francs, it is not allowable 
to take an oath which one does not intend to keep; and to 
pass from two hundred thousand francs to twelve millions, 
it is hardly right to break up the Constitution and laws of 
one’s country, and to rush from ambush upon a sovereign 
assembly, to slaughter Paris, to exile ten thousand per- 
sons, and to proscribe forty thousand. I continue to heip 
you penetrate this singular mystery. Unquestionably it is 
agreeable to have one’s lackeys in white silk stockings; but 


Napoleon the Little. 219 


to arrive at this great result, it is not permitted to suppress 
the glory and the thought of a people, to overthrow the cen- 
tral tribune of the civilized world, to fetter the progress of 
the human race, and to pour out waves of blood. That is 
forbidden. By whom? do you again ask? you, who see 
before you nobody who forbids you anything. Patience, 
you will soon know what !—here you start back, and I 
understand it,—When one has on one side his interests, his 
ambition, his fortune, his pleasure, a fine palace to keep on 
the Faubourg St. Honoré, and on the other side the jere- 
miads and the furious cries of women whose husbands 
they are taking off, of mothers whose sons they are seizing, 
of families whose fathers they are tearing away, of children 
whose bread they have stolen, of people whose liberty they 
have confiscated, of society whose prop, the laws, they 
have drawn away ; what ! that when these bawlings are on 
one side, and interest on the other, it is not to be per- 
mitted to disdain these uproars, to let all these people 
shout on, to tread on the obstacle, and to go perfectly 
natural over everything to that spot where one sees his 
fortune, his pleasure, and the fine palace of the Faubourg 
St. Honoré. That is the plan of the strong man. What! 
It is necessary to be engrossed with thinking on the 
fact that three or four years ago, one knows no longer 
when, one knows no longer where, one day in December, 
when it was very cold, and rained, and one had to quita 
chamber in an inn to lodge one’s self better, that one ut- 
tered, one no longer knows on what suggestion, in a badly 
lighted hall, before eight or nine hundred imbeciles, who 
believed one, these eight letters: ‘‘I swear it!” What! 
when one meditates a great act, it is mecessary to pass 


220 Napoleon the Little. 


one’s time in asking one’s self about what evil might 
possibly result from what one does; to give one’s self 
any uneasiness because this man here will be devoured 
by vermin in these casements, that other there will rot 
in the hulks, this other die at Cayenne, that other be 
killed by the bayonet, that one crushed with paving-stones, 
that other will have been fool enough to get himself shot ; 
that these will be ruined, those exiled, and all the men 
that one ruins, exiles, shoots, massacres; all who rot in 
the hulks, die in Africa, are honest men who shall have 
done their duty! A man must stop at these things! 
What! a man has wants, he has no money; he is a 
prince, chance places power in his hands; he uses it, he 
authorizes lotteries, he has the ingots of gold shown in 
the thoroughfare Jouffroy ; the pockets of all the world 
open, one draws out what one can; you give some to 
your friends, devoted companions, to whom one owes 
a recognition, and as there arrives a moment when 
public indiscretion mixes itself up with the affair, and 
this infamous liberty of the press wishes to pierce the 
mystery, and justice imagines that it concerns her, it would 
be necessary to quit the Elysée, leave power, and go stupidly 
to seat one’s self between two men-at-arms on the bench of 
the sixteenth chamber. Come then, is it not more simple 
to seat one’s self on the throne of the emperor? Is it not 
simpler to crush the liberty of the press? Is it not simpler 
to crush justice? Is it not shorter to put the judges under 
one’s feet? They do not ask for anything better, after 
all! They are all ready! and it would not be permitted, 
it is forbidden!! Yes, my lord, that is forbidden! 
Who opposes it? Who does not permit it? Who forbids 


Napoleon the Little. 221 


it? M. Bonaparte, one is- master; one has eight mil- 
lions of votes for his crimes, and twelve millions of francs 
for his privy purse; one has a senate, and M. Sibour 
within it; one has armies, cannon, fortresses, Trop- 
longs* flat on their stomachs, Baroches on all fours ; 
one is despot, all powerful. A certain man who is lost in 
the darkness, a passer-by, unknown, stands before you, and 
says: “Thou shall not do that.” This some one, this 
mouth that speaks in the shade, that one does not see, this 
unknown insolent is—the human conscience? ‘That is 
what the human conscience is. It is some one, I repeat, 
that one does not see, and who is stronger than an army, 
more numerous than seven million five hundred thousand 
votes, higher than a senate, more religious than an arch- 
bishop, more intelligent in the question of right than M. 
Troplong, more prompt to outstrip it matters not what 
justice than M. Baroche, and which thee and thou’s Your 
Majesty. 





* Minister of Justice. 


CHEAP TER’ Vit: 


Let us examine these novelties a little. Learn then, 
M. Bonaparte, this further: What distinguishes a man 
from a brute is the idea of good and evil. Of that good 
and that evil of which I spoke to you just now. There is 
the abyss. The animal is a complete being. What makes 
the grandeur of man is, that he is an incomplete being ; 
itis to feel one’s self in a multitude of points outside of 
the finite. It is to perceive something on that side of one, 
something on this. That something which is on either 
side of man is the mysterious ; is—to employ those weak 
human expressions which are always imperfect, and 
never express more than one side of a thing—is the moral 
world. This moral world man bathes in, is steeped in, as 
much, nay more, than in the material world. He lives in 
what he feels more than in what he sees. In vain does 
the creation beset him, in vain does want assail him, in 
vain does enjoyment tempt him, in vain does the brute 
which is in him torment him; a sort of perpetual aspira- 
tion to another region casts him irresistibly outside of the 
created world, outside of want, outside of enjoyment, 
outside of the brute. He is always, at each instant, 
throughout all, catching glimpses of the higher world, 
and he fills his soul with this vision, and regulates his 
actions by it. He does not feel complete in this life below. 
He carries in himself, so to speak, a mysterious copy of 
this prior and later world, and perfect world, with which he 


Napoleon the Little. 223 


ceaselessly, and in spite of himself, compares this imperfect 
present world, and himself and his infirmities, and his appe- 
tites, his passions, and his actions. When he sees that he is 
approaching this ideal model, he is joyful; when he sees that 
he is departing from it, he is sad. He profoundly understands 
that there is nothing useless or inadmissible in this world, 
nothing which does not come from something, and does 
not lead to something. The just, the unjust, the good, 
the evil, good works, bad actions, all fall into the gulf; 
but they do not perish, they go away into the infinite to 
be the accusation or the benediction of those who have 
done them. After death one finds them again, and the 
whole are summed up. To lose one’s self, to vanish, to 
be annihilated, to cease to be, is no more possible for the 
moral than the material atom. Behold in man this grand 
double consciousness of liberty and responsibility. It 
is given to him to be good or to be wicked. That will 
be an account to settle He can be guilty; and 
striking and terrible fact, and one on which I insist, in 
that lies his grandeur. There is nothing equal to it for 
the brute. For him there is nothing but instinct ; to 
drink when thirst comes, to eat when hungry ; to breed in 
the season, to sleep when the sun goes down, and to awake 
when it arises ; to do the reverse if he be a night animal. 
The animal has only one kind of obscure self; which no 
moral gleam lights up. All his law, I repeat it, is instinct. 
Instinct, a sort of rail on which fatal nature draws the 
brute. No liberty, then no responsibility, and in conse- 
quence no other life. The brute does neither good nor 
evil; he is ignorant of either. The tiger is innocent. If 
you only happened to be as innocent as he is! At some 


224 Napoleon the Little. 


moments, one is tempted to believe, that having no more 
- inward light than he has, you have no more responsibility. 
Indeed there are times when I pity you. Who knows? 
You are perhaps only an unfortunate blind force. Mons. 
Louis Bonaparte, you do not possess the idea of good 
and evil. You are perhaps the only man in all humanity with- 
out it. That places a bar between you and the human race. 
Yes, you are impregnable. It is that which constitutes your 
genius, they say. I agree that in any case it is that which 
now constitutes your power. But do you know what issues 
from this kind of power? Action?—yes. Justice?—no. 
Crime tries to cheat history about its name. It comes and 
says: ‘‘I am success.” Thou art crime! you are crowned 
and masked! Down with the mask! down with the 
crown! Ah! you are losing your paint, you are losing 
your appeals to the people, your plebiscite, your ballots, 
your certificates, your additions, your executive commissions, 
announcing the whole; your red or green streamers, with 
this number on gilt paper: 7,500,000. You will make 
nothing by getting up this scene. There are things about 
which one cannot change universal opinion. The human 
race, taken in mass, is an honest man. Even around you 
they judge you. There is no one among all your establish- 
ment, among those decorated with lace, as among those 
in the embroidered uniform, valet of the stable or valet of the 
senate, who does not say in a low tone what I say aloud. 
What I declare publicly, they whisper ; that is all the dif 
ference. You are omnipotent: they bow down, nothing 
more. ‘They salute you with blushes on their brows. They 
feel that they are vile, but they &vow that you are infamous. 
Stop! since you are in the mood to give chase to those 


Napoleon the Little. 225 


whom you call the revolters of December; since it is 
on them that you let loose your hounds; since you 
have installed a Maupas and created a minister of police 
especially for that, I denounce to you this rebellious and 
unsubdued insurgent, the universal conscience. You 
give money, but it is the hand that receives, not the con- 
science. Conscience! While you are about it, enter it 
on your lists of exiles. It is an obstinate opponent,— 
opinionated, tenacious, inflexible,—and one that makes 
trouble everywhere. Chase it out of France forme. You 
will be let alone forever after. Do you want to know how 
it treats you, even in the houses of your friends? Do you 
wish to know for what reason an honourable knight of St. 
Louis, eighty years old, a great enemy of ‘‘demagogues” 
and a partizan of yours, voted for you on the zoth of De- 
cember? ‘‘He isa wretch,” said he, ‘‘but he is a necessary 
wretch!” No! there are no necessary wretches. No! the 
criminal is never useful; crime is never good. Society 
saved by treason? Blasphemy! We must leave it to 
the archbishops to say such things. Nothing good has evil 
for foundation. The just God does not impose on humanity 
the necessity of wretches. There is nothing necessary in 
this world but justice and truth. If that old man had 
looked less at life and more at the tomb, he would have 
seen that. This speech is surprising on the part of an old 
man ; for there is a light from God which illumines souls 
near the tomb and shows them the true. Never do right 
and crime meet. ‘The day when they should be coupled 
the words of the human language would change their 
meaning, all certainty would vanish, and social darkness 


would spread over all. When, by chance, such a thing has 
1o* 


226 Napoleon the Little. 


been seen at times in history,—-when, by chance, it hap- 
pens for a moment that crime has the force of law, —some- 
thing trembles in the very groundwork of humanity. ‘‘Jus 
que datum scelert !” cries Lucian, and this line crosses history 
like a cry of horror. 

Then, even by the avowal of those who voted for you, 
you are a ‘“‘wretch.” I take away ‘‘necessary.” You 
cannot alter this. ‘‘ Well, be it so,” you will say; it is the 
truth ; but one gets himself ‘‘absolved” by universal suf- 
frage. Impossible! How! impossible? Yes, impossible. 
Iam going to put the thing under your very nose. 


CHAPTER VAIL 


You are captain of artillery at Berne, M. Louis Bonaparte. 
You have necessarily a touch of algebra and geometry. 
Here are some axioms of which you have probably some 
idea: two and two make four; a straight line is the short- 
est distance between two points; the whole is greater 
than the part. Now, make 7,500,000 votes declare that 
two and two make five; that a straight line is the longest 
distance ; that the whole is Jess than the part. Make eight 
millions declare it, ten millions, a hundred millions; you 
have not advanced one step. Well, now, this is going to 
surprise you: there are axioms in good character, in 
honesty, in justice, just as there are axioms in geometry ; _ 
and moral truth is no more at the mercy of a vote than 
algebraic truth. The idea of good and evil is not to be 
decided by universal suffrage. It does not belong to a bal- 
lot to make the false true, and injustice just. They do not 
put human conscience to vote. Do you understand now? 
See this lamp, this little, obscure light, forgotten in a cor- 
ner, lost in the shadow. Look at it—admire it. It is 
scarcely visible; it burns all alone. Make seven million 
five hundred thousand mouths blow at it at once: you will 
not put it out; you will not even make the flame stagger. 
Make the hurricane blow on it: the flame continues to rise 
straight and pure toward heaven. That lamp is conscience. 
That fiame is that which sheds light in the midst of the 
night of exile on this sheet of paper on which I am writing 
at this moment. 


CHAP TRE 


Tuus, then, whatever your numbers may be, forged or 
not, extorted or not, true or false, it makes little differ- 
ence ; those who live with the eye fixed on justice say, 
and will continue to say, that crime is crime, that perjury is 
perjury, that treason is treason, that murder is murder, that 
blood is blood, that mire is mire, that a villain is a villain ; 
and that such as think to copy Napoleon ona small scale 
are copying Lacenaire on a large one ; they say that and they 
will repeat it in spite of your numbers, seeing that seven 
million five hundred thousand votes weigh nothing against 
the conscience of one honest man, seeing that ten millions, 
that a hundred millions of votes, the very unanimity of the 
human race itself ballotting ez masse, does not count before 
this atom, this particle of God, the soul of the just, seeing 
that universal suffrage, which has all sovereignty on political 
questions, has no jurisdiction over moral ones. 

I lay out of this question for the moment, as I said just 
now, your election proceedings—the bandages put on 
people’s eyes, the gags placed in their mouths, the cannon 
on the public squares, the drawn sabres, the spies swarming, 
silence and terror conducting the voter to the urn like the 
malefactor conducted to the post; I lay out that. I sup- 
pose I repeat to you true universal suffrage, free, pure, 
real universal suffrage, sovereign of itself as it ought to be ; 
newspapers in all hands, men and facts questioned and 


Napoleon the Little. 229 


sifted, post-bills covering the walls, speech everywhere, 
light everywhere ! 

Well, to such universal suffrage submit peace and war, 
the effective force of the army, credit, the budget, public 
charity, the death penalty, the life-tenure of the judges, the 
indissolubility of marriage, divorce, the civil and political 
condition of woman, free education, the constitutions of 
municipal corporations, the rights of labour, the salary of 
the clergy, free trade, railroads, the circulation, coloniza- 
tion, taxes, all problems whose solution does not draw in 
their train its own abdication ; for universal suffrage can 
do everything except abdicate; submit ‘Hem to it; it 
will solve them magisterially, with possible error, doubt- 
less, but with all the amount of certainty which is 
possible to man. It will solve them magisterially. 
Now, try to make it decide the question whether 
John or Peter did right or wrong in stealing an apple 
on a farm. There it stops. There its effort proves 
abortive. Why? Is it because the question is too 
low? No; it is because it is too high. All that 
constitutes the proper organization of societies, whether 
you consider them as territories, as corporations, as a state, 
or as a country; all political, financial, social matters de- 
pend upon universal suffrage, and obey it. Zhe smallest 
atom of the least moral queshon defies wt. The ship is at 
the mercy of the ocean. ‘The star is not ! 

They said of M. Leverrier, and of you, M. Bonaparte, 
that you were the only two men who believed in their stars. 
~You believe in your star most truly ; you are looking for it 
above your head. Well! this star which you are looking 
for outside of yourself, other men have in themselves. It 


230 Napoleon the Little. 


sends out its rays under the arch of their skull; it lights 
and guides them; it makes them see the true colors of 
life ; it shows them the good and the evil in the obscurity 
of human destiny, the just and the unjust, the real and the 
false ; it reveals to them ignominy and honour, rectitude 
and felony, virtue and crime. This star, without which 
the human soul is only night, is moral truth. This light 
failing you, you were deceived. Your ballot of the zoth 
December is only to a man who thinks a sort of mon- 
strous artlessness. You applied what you call ‘‘ universal 
suffrage” to a question which is no connection with uni- 
versal suffrage. You are not a politician—you are a male- 
factor. What ought to be done with you has no reference 
to universal suffrage. Yes, artlessness! [I insist on it. 
The bandit of Abruzzes, with hands scarcely washed, and 
having blood yet in his nails, goes to ask absolution of 
the priest ; you have asked absolution from the vote ; 
only you have forgotten to confess; and when you asked 
the vote to absolve you, you placed your pistol at its 
temple. Ah, desperate wretch! to ‘‘absolve” you, as 
you say, is out of the power of the people ; it is out of the 
power of man. Listen. 

Nero, who had invented the society of the Tenth of 
December, and who, like you, employed it to applaud his 
comedies, and even, still like you, his tragedies; Nero, 
after having bored his mother through the bosom with a 
knife, would have been able himself also to convoke his 
universal suffrage, which still further resembled yours 
in that it was not troubled by the license of the press ; 
Nero, pontiff and emperor, surrounded by judges and 
priests prostrating themselves before him, would have been 


Napoleon the Little. 231 


able, laying one of his bloody hands on the warm corpse 
of the empress and raising the other to heaven, to take all 
Olympus to witness that he had not shed her blood; and 
to adjure his universal suffrage to declare, in the face of 
gods and men, that he, Nero, had not killed that woman ; 
his universal suffrage, discharging its functions about as 
yours did, in the same light and the same liberty, would 
have been able to affirm by seven million five hundred 
thousand votes that the divine Czsar Nero, pontiff and 
emperor, had done no evil to the woman who was dead ! 
Know, sir, that Nero would not have been ‘‘absolved ;” 
it would have been enough that one voice, one single voice 
upon the earth, the most humble and the most obscure, 
should have lifted itself in the midst of that profound night 
of the Roman empire, and cried in the darkness, ‘‘ Nero is 
a parricide;” this would have sufficed in order that the 
echo, the eternal echo of the human conscience, should 
repeat forever, from people to people, and from century to 
century, ‘‘ Nero killed his mother!” Well, that voice which 
protests in the darkness, is mine. I cry to-day, and do not 
doubt it, the universal conscience of humanity repeats with 
me: ‘‘Louis Bonaparte has murdered France! Louis 
Bonaparte has killed his mother |” 


BOOK SEVENTH.—THE ABSOLUTION. 


SECOND FORM OF ABSOLUTION : THE OATH. 
——————— 


CUED ASE AER a 


A REDOUBLED OATH. 


Wuat is Louis Bonaparte? He is living perjury, men- 
tal reservation incarnate ; he is felony in flesh and bone; 
he is false swearing, having on the hat of a general and 
having himself called my lord. 

Well, what does he demand of France, this ambush- 
man? Anoath. An oath! Assuredly, after the 20th of 
December, 1848, and the day of the 2d December, 1851, 
after the dissolution of the assembly by the armed hand, 
after arresting and hunting and tracking the inviolable repre- 
sentatives, after the confiscation of the Republic, after the 
coup d’état, one ought to expect a cynical and honest 
shout of laughter on the part of this malefactor with regard 
to an oath, and that this Sbrigani should say to France : 
“Tt is very droll; do not speak any more about such 
stupidities as that.” Not at all: he wishes an oath. Thus, 
mayors, judges, spies, prefects, generals, city guards, rural 
guards, commissioners of police, functionaries, senators, 
councillors of state, legislators, clerks; a herd, it is said, 
he wishes it; this idea has passed through his head; he 


Napoleon the Little. 233 


intends it thus ; it is his pleasure. Come, make haste, de- 
file, you in an enregistering office, you in 2 pretorium, you 
under the eyes of your brigadiers, you at the minister’s 
house ; you, senators, at the Tuileries, in the parlour of 
the marshals ; you, spies, at the prefecture of police ; you, 
chief-presidents and procurers-general, in his ante-clhamber. 
Make haste! by carriage, on foot, by horse ; in your robes, 
in your scarfs, in costume, in uniform, in mourning ; gilded, 
spangled, plumed ; with your swords at your sides, with 
gala-cap on your forehead, the priestly band on your necks, 
with belts on your stomachs; arrive! some before the 
plaster busts, some before the man himself; well done! 
there you are ; you are all up to the mark; nobody fails 
him. Look him well in the face; concentrate your 
thoughts ; search in your conscience, in your loyalty, in 
your shame, in your religion; take off your glove, raise 
your hand, and make oath to his perjury, and swear fidelity 
to his treason. 

Is it done? Yes. Ah! what an infamous farce! Then 
Louis Bonaparte takes the oath seriously. True, he trusts 
to my word, to thy word, to yours, to ours, to theirs; he 
believes everybody’s word except—his‘own. He requires 
that about him they should swear, and he orders that they 
should be loyal. It pleases Messalina to surround herself 
with virgins. 

Admirably well! He wishes that they should have 
honour. ‘‘ You will consider it an understood thing, Saint 
Arnaud, and you will consider it,” said Maupas. Let us 
go to the bottom of these things, however: there are two 
kinds of oaths. The oath which freely, solemnly, in the 
face of God and men, after having received a commission 


234° Napoleon the Little. 


full of confidence from 6,000,000 citizens, one takes in 
full national assembly, to the constitution of one’s country, 
to the law, to the right, to the nation, to the people, to 
France—that is nothing, that does not bind; one can play 
with that, and laugh at it, and tear it to pieces some fine 
morning under the heel of one’s boot ; but an oath that one 
takes under the cannon, under the sabre, under the eye of 
the police, to keep the employment which enables him to 
live, which gives one bread, to preserve the rank which is 
one’s property ; the oath which, to save one’s head and the 
head of his children, one takes to a cheat, to a rebel, to the 
violator of the laws, to the murderer of the Republic, to a 
backslider from all righteous conduct, to the man who 
himself has broken his oath,—oh! that oath is sacred ! 
Don’t let us joke: the oath that one takes to the 2d of 
December, nephew of the 18th Brumaire, is doubly holy. 
What I admire is absurdity, to receive as cash and as sound 
coin these /uro of the official herd; not even to dream 
that one has destroyed all scruples, and that he would not 
be able to secure a single word that can be relied on! 
One is prince and one is traitor! To set an example at 
the head of the State, and to imagine that it will not be fol- 
lowed! To sow lead and fancy that one is going to reap 
gold! Not even to perceive that all consciences model them- 
selves in such a case on the conscience above, and that the 
false oath of the prince makes all oaths bad money ! 


CHAPTER-TE; 


INEQUALITY IN THE PRICES. 


Anp then, of whom do you require these oaths? Of 
this prefect? he has betrayed the State. Of this general ? 
he has betrayed the flag. Of this magistrate? he has 
betrayed the law. Of these functionaries? they have be- 
trayed the Republic. Curious thing, and one which makes 
philosophy consider, this heap of traitors from which issues 
this heap of oaths! Then let us insist on this beauty of 
the second of December. M. Bonaparte—Louis, believes in 
people’s oaths! he believes in the oaths that they take even to 
him! When M. Rouher takes off his glove and says “‘I 
” when M. Suin takes off his glove and says ‘‘I 
swear it ;” when M. Troplong puts his hand on his chest at 
the spot where the third button of senators is situated, and 


swear it;’ 


the hearts of other men, and says ‘‘ I swear it,” M. Bonaparte 
feels the tears in his eyes, adds up with emotion all these 
loyalties, and contemplates these beings with tenderness. 
He confides! he believes! O abyss of candour! Most cer- 
tainly the innocence of scoundrels sometimes dazzles hon- 
est men. One thing, nevertheless, astonishes the benevo- 
lent observer, and puts him a little out of humour ; that is 
the capricious, disproportionate manner in which the oaths 
are paid for; it is the inequality of the price that M. Bona- 
parte puts on this merchandise. For instance, M. Vidocq, 
if he were still chief of the Service of Safety, would have six 
thousand francs wages a year; M. Baroche has twenty-five 
thousand. It follows from this that the oath of M. Vidocq 
would not bring him in but sixteen francs sixty-six cen- 


236 Napoleon the Little. 


times a day, whilst the oath of M. Baroche brings him in 
two hundred and twenty-two francs twenty-two centimes a 
day. This is evidently unjust. Why this difference? An 
oath is an oath; an oath is composed of a glove taken off 
and eight letters. 

What does M. Baroche’s oath possess which M. Vidocq’s 
does not? You will tell me that it depends upon the dif- 
ference in the functions ; that M. Baroche presides at the 
Council of State, and that M. Vidocq would be only chief 
of the Service of Security. I answer that these are chance 
differences ; that M. Baroche would probably excel in di- 
recting the Service of Security, and that M. Vidocq* would 
make a very good president at the Council of State. That 
is not a reason, Are there then different qualities of oaths ? 
Is it as it is with masses? Are there then, also, masses at 
fifty cents and masses at ten cents, which, as the curate said, 
are only fit for the ignoramuses? Have they oaths at their 
several prices? Is there in this commodity of oaths super- 
fine, extra fine, fine, and half fine? Are the first of better 
materials than the others? are they more solid, less full 
of tow and cotton? Are they better dyed? Are there oaths 
all new, and which have not been worn ; oaths worn at the 
knees, oaths patched, oaths worn down at the heels; is there, 
in short, any choice? Let them tell us of it; the thing is 
worth while, we are the ones who pay. This observation is 
in the interest of the taxpayers. I ask M. Vidocq’s par- 
don for having made use of his name. I acknowledge 
that I had no right to doit. After all, M. Vidocq might 
have refused the oath. 





* He was a celebrated detective, assuming marvellous disguises and 
mingling with thieves. 


Sa AE ACP TB Re: LET: 


OATH OF THE MEN OF LETTERS AND SCIENCE. 


Precious item: M. Bonaparte wished Arago to swear. 
Know it, astronomy has to make oath. In a well regu- 
lated State, like France or China, all is office, even science, 
The mandarin of the institute depends upon the mandarin 
of the police. The great telescope, with parallactic* feet, 
owes homage to M. Bonaparte. An astronomer is a kind 
of sky policeman. The observatory is a sentry-box, like 
any other. It is necessary to keep an eyeon the good God, 
who is above, and who seems sometimes not to be com- 
pletely submissive to the Constitution of the fourteenth of 
January. Heaven is full of disagreeable allusions, and 
ought to be well looked after. ‘The discovery of a new 
spot on the sun constitutes, evidently, a case for censor- 
ship. The prediction of a high tide may be seditious. 
The announcement of an eclipse of the moon may be 
treasonable. We are something of a moon at the Elysée. 
Astronomy is almost as dangerous as a free press. Do 
they know what is taking place in those téte-d-tétes between 
Arago and Jupiter? If it was M. Leverrier, all right, but 
a member of the provisionary government! take care, M. 
de Maupas! + it is necessary that the bureau of longitudes 


* That is, widely separated. 
+ Minister of police, 


238 Napoleon the Little. 


should swear not to conspire with the stars, and above all 
not with those foolish blunders of celestial coups d’état 
which they call comets. And then we have already said, 
one is a fatalist when one is Bonaparte. The great Na- 
poleon had a star ; the little one ought certainly to have a 
nebulus of them ; astronomers are certainly somewhat as- 
trologers. Gentlemen, make oath. It is needless to say 
that Arago refused. One of the virtues of the oath to M. 
Bonaparte is that according as you refuse it or accord 
it, this oath takes away or gives to you talents, merits, 
adaptabilities. You are professor of Greek and Latin, 
make oath, or else they will drive you from your chair ; 
you no longer know any Latin or Greek. You are 
professor of rhetoric, make oath, or else tremble! the 
orations of Theramene and the dream of Athalia are for- 
bidden to you; you wander about the rest of your days 
without ever being able to re-enter. You are professor of 
philosophy, make oath to M. Bonaparte, or else you will 
become incapable of comprehending the mysteries of the 
human conscience, and of explaining them to young 
people. You are professor of medicine, make oath, with- 
out which you will no longer know how to try the pulse 
of a fever patient. But if the good professors go away, 
there will be no more good scholars! In medicine par- 
ticularly this is serious. What will become of the sick? 
Of whom? The sick. That is a matter of great inter- 
est. But we have something besides the sick to think of. 
The matter of importance is that medicine should make 
oath to M. Bonaparte. Otherwise either seven million five 
hundred thousand votes have no sense, or it is evident that 


Napoleon the Little. 239 


it is better to have your leg cut off by an ass who has 
made oath, than by Dupuytren, if he is refractory.* 

Ah! one wishes to laugh at it, but all this weighs on the 
heart. Are you a young and rare and generous spirit like 
Deschanel, a firm and correct intelligence like Despois, a 
reason serious and energetic like Jacques, an eminent 
writer, a popular historian like Michelet, make oath, or die 
of hunger. They refuse. Silence, and the darkness which 
they stoically enter, know the rest. 





* If they have sense, and Dupuytren is not among them, then Dupuy- 
tren has no sense. He was one of the greatest surgeons of the age. 


CHa Pak Rave 
CURIOSITIES OF THE THING. 


ALL morality is denied by such an oath, all shame 
swallowed up, all modesty defied. There is no reason» 
why-one should not see unheard-of things ; one sees them. 
In such a city as Evreux,* for example, the judges who 
made oath judge the judges who refused it. 





Ls 
* The president of the tribunal of commerce at Evreux refuses the oath, 


Let us permit the Moniteur to speak: 

““M. Verney, the former president of the tribunal of commerce at 
“¢ Evreux, was cited to appear on Thursday last before the correctional 
‘€ judges of Evreux, on account of events which took place on the 29th of 
*¢ April last within the bounds of the consular precinct. M. Verney is 
“¢ detained on the charge of exciting hatred and contempt of the govern- 
‘¢ment. The judges in the first instance dismissed Verney with an admo- 
“nition. Appeal a minime of the procurer of the Republic. Judgment 
“of the Court of Appeals of Rouen. 

“The court, seeing that the prosecutions have for their only object the 
“repression of the crime of exciting hatred and contempt of the govern- 
“ment; seeing that this crime would result, according to the accusation 
“ from the last paragraph of the letter written by Verney to the procurer 
“ of the Republic at Evreux, on the 26th of April last, and which was couched 
‘Cin these terms: ‘ But it would be too serious to claim for a much longer 
“time what we believe to be the right. The magistracy itself would take 
“it kindly of us not to expose the robe of the judge to succumb under the 
*€ farce which your dispatch announces to us,” 

‘Seeing that censurable as may have been the conduct of Verney in this 


e 


Napoleon the Little. 241 


Ignominy seated on the tribunal makes honour sit on the 
stool; conscience sold censures conscience honest; the 
woman of the town lashes the virgin. With this oath one 
treads from surprise to surprise. Nicolet is only a booby 
beside M. Bonaparte. When M. Bonaparte has gone the 
rounds of his valets, his accomplices, and of his victims, 
and pocketed the oath, he turned with good nature toward 
the valiant chiefs of the army of Africa, and held with them 
pretty nearly this language: ‘‘Apropos, you know, I have 
had you arrested in your beds during the night by my peo- 
ple; my spies have entered your houses with the sword 
uplifted ; I have even decorated them since for this feat of 
arms ; I have had you menaced with the gag, if you utter 
a cry; I have had you taken by the throat by my galley 
sergeants ; I have had you put in Mazas in the thieves’ 
cell, and at Ham in my own cell; you have yet on your 
wrists the marks of the cord with which I have bound you. 
Good-morning, gentlemen; God have you in his holy 
keeping ; swear fidelity to me.” 

Changarnier looked fixedly at him, and answered : ‘No, 





“‘ affair, the court cannot see in the terms in this part of his letter the 
“crime of exciting to the hatred and contempt of the government, since 
“the order in virtue of which force was to be employed to hinder the 
** judges who had refused to take the oath from sitting, did not emanate 
“ from the government. 

“Seeing that there is not room, therefore, to make the penal law apply 
“to him \by these facts, confirms the judgment on which the appeal is 
“ made without costs. 

“The Court of Appeal of Rouen has for its first president Franck-Carré, 
“former procurer-general of the Court of Peers in the prosecution at Co- 
“‘logne; the same who addressed these words to M. Louis Bonaparte : 
““* You have tampered with the loyalty of citizens and distributed money 
“to buy treason.’” 


I! 


242 Napoleon the Little. 


1”? 


traitor Bedeau answered: ‘‘No, forger!” Lamoriciére 
answered: “No, perjurer!” Leflo answered: ‘‘No, 
bandit!” Charras gave him a slap in the face. At the 
present moment the face of M. Bonaparte is red, not with 
shame, but with the blow. 

Another variety of oath. In the casemates, in the fort- 
resses, in the hulks, in the penal colonies of Africa, there 
are prisoners by thousands. Who are those prisoners? 
We have said, they are republicans, patriots, soldiers of the 
law, innocent men, martyrs. What they suffer, generous 
voices have already denounced ; one catches a glimpse of 
it; we ourselves, in the special book upon the second 
of December, shall succeed in tearing off the veil. 
Well! Do they want to know what happens? Some- 
times, in the extremity of suffering, exhausted of strength, 
bending under miseries, without covering for the feet, 
without bread, without clothing, without shirts, burning 
with fever, gnawed with vermin, poor workmen torn from 
their workshops, poor peasants torn from their plows, 
mourning a wife, a mother, children ; a family widowed or 
orphaned, without bread at hand, and perhaps without 
shelter, heaped together, sick, dying, in despair, a few of 
these unhappy creatures give up, and consent to ‘‘ask par- 
don.” ‘Then they bring them to sign a letter, already made 
out, and addressed to ‘‘ My Lord, the Prince-President.” 
This letter we publish, exactly in the shape in which 
Quentin Bauchart acknowledges it : 

‘*T, the undersigned, declare on my honour that I accept 
with thankfulness the pardon which is extended to me by 
Prince Louis-Napoleon, and I engage to have nothing to 
do with secret societies, to respect the laws, and to be /azth- 


Napoleon the Little. 243 


ful to the government which the country has given me by 
the vote of the zoth and 21st of December, 1851.” 

Let no one mistake the meaning of this grave fact. This 
is not clemency granted, it is clemency implored. * This 
formula, ‘‘ Ask your pardon of us,” means: ‘‘ Accord us 
our pardon.” The assassin, leaning over the assassinated, 
with his knife raised, cries to him: ‘‘I have arrested you, 
seized you, thrown you to the ground, stripped you, robbed 
you, pierced you with stabs; then you are under my feet ; 
your blood is pouring out from twenty wounds ; tell me that 
you repent, and I will not absolutely kill you.” This repens- 
- ance of the innocent, exacted by the criminal, is nothing 
but the form which takes him out of his inward remorse. 
He imagines himself to be assured in this manner against 
his own crime. 

To whatever expedients he may have recourse to shake 
off the thought of it,—however much he may make the 
seven million five hundred thousand little bells of his 
‘‘plebiscitum” ring in his ears,—the man of the coup d’état 
thinks at moments ; he catches vague glimpses of a to-mor- 
row, and struggles against the inevitable future. He needs 
a legal purge, a discharge, a withdrawal, a receipt. He 
asks it of the conquered, and at need he puts them to the 
torture to obtain it. At the bottom of the conscience of 
every prisoner, of every transported and of every proscribed 
man, Louis Bonaparte feels that there is a tribunal there, 
and that this tribunal gives notice of his trial ; he trembles ; 
the hangman has a secret fear of his victim, and, under 
the form of a pardon accorded to this victim, he has 
his own acquittal signed by this judge. He hopes thus to 
call off the attention of France, who is herself a living 


244 Napoleon the Little. 


conscience-and an attentive tribunal, and who, he thinks— 
the day of his sentence having arrived, and she having 
seen him absolved by his victims—will herself give him 
pardon. He is mistaken; let him pierce the wall at 
another point,—he will not escape by this. 


CHAPTER V. 
THE FIFTH OF APRIL, 1852. 


Here is what they saw at the Tuileries on the sth of 
April, 1852. Toward eight o’clock in the evening, the 
ante-chamber was filled with men in red robes; grave, ma- 
jestic, speaking low ; holding in their hands black velvet 
caps trimmed with gold lace; the most of them with white 
hair. They were the presidents and counsellors of the 
courts of cassation, the first presidents of the courts of ap- 
peal, and the procurers-general ; all the high magistracy 
of France. These men remained in this ante-chamber. 
An aid-de-camp introduced them and left them there. A 
quarter of an hour passed, and then a half-hour, and then 
an hour; they went and came, backward and forward, 
talking among themselves, looking at their watches, waiting 
for the ringing of a bell. At the end of an hour they per- 
ceived that they had not even arm-chairs to sit down on. 
One of them, M. Troplong, went into another ante-chamber, 
where the valets were, and complained. They brought him 
a chair. At last a folding-door opened ; they entered a 
saloon pell-mell. There a man in a black frock was stand- 
ing leaning against a mantel-piece. What did these men 
in red robes come to do at the house of this man in a 
black coat? They came to make oath to him. It was M. 
Bonaparte. He nodded to them; they bowed down to the 
earth, as was proper. Before M. Bonaparte, at a few paces, 


246 Napoleon the Little. 


there was standing his chancellor, M. Abattucci, late liberal 
deputy, now minister of justice of the coup d’état. They 
began. M. Abattucci made a discourse, and M. Bonaparte 
a speech. The prince pronounced, looking at the carpet, 
a few drawling and disdainful words: he spoke of his 


” 


‘legitimacy ;” after which the magistrates swore. Each 
one raised his hand in his turn. While they were swearing, 
M. Bonaparte, with his back half turned, chatted with some 
aids-de-camp grouped behind him. When it was finished, 
he turned his back altogether, and they went away, shaking 
their heads, ashamed and humiliated, not for having done a 
base act, but because they had not had chairs in the ante- 
chamber. 

As they went out, this dialogue was heard: ‘‘ There,” 
said one of two, ‘‘there is an oath which it was necessary 
totake.” ‘* And which it will be necessary to keep,” replied 
asecond. ‘‘ Like the master of the house,” added a third. 

All this is abject; let us pass on. Among the first presi- 
dents who swore fidelity to Louis Bonaparte, there were a 
certain number of the late peers of France, who, as peers, 
had condemned Louis Bonaparte to perpetual imprison- 
ment. But why look so far back? Let us pass further on. 
Here is what is better. Among these magistrates there were 
seven men named thus: Hardouin, Moreau, Pataille, 
Cauchy, Delapalme, Grandet, Quesnault. These seven 
men composed, before the 2d of December, the high court 
of justice; the first, Hardouin, president; the two last, 
substitutes; the four others, judges. These men had 
received and accepted from the Constitution of 1848 a com- 
mission couched in the following terms: 

‘Art. 68. Every measure by which the President of the 


Napoleon the Little. 247 


“* Republic dissolves the national assembly, prorogues it or 
‘* places obstacles in the way of the execution of its decrees, 
‘‘is a crime of high treason. The judges of the high 
‘court shall assemble immediately, on pain of forfeiture ; 
‘they shall convoke the jury in the place which they shall 
‘‘ designate, in order to proceed to the trial of the president 
“‘and his accomplices ; they shall constitute themselves the 
‘‘magistrates charged with fulfilling the functions ‘of the 
‘* public ministry.” 

On the 2d of December, in presence of the flagrant 
outrage, they had commenced the process, and named the 
procurer-general, M. Renouard, who had accepted, to pro- 
ceed against Louis Bonaparte on’ the crime of high treason. 
Let us join this name, Renouard, to the seven others. On 
the 5th April they were—the whole eight of them—in the 
ante-chamber of Louis Bonaparte! What they did there 
we have just seen. 

Here it is impossible not to pause. These are dismal 
ideas on which it is necessary to have the strength to dwell ; 
these are sewers of ignominy that it is necessary to have the 
courage to sound. See this man. He was born by chance 
—by misfortune—in a little paltry room, in a paltry house, 
in a den, they know not where, they know not of whom. 
He has come out of the dust to fall into the bog. He had 
only just enough of a father and a mother to enable him 
to be born, after which all forsook him. He crawled the 
best that he could. He grew up with naked feet, naked 
head, in rags, and without knowing what to do to live. 
He does not know how to read, he does not know that 
there are laws over his head ; he scarcely knows that there 
is a heaven. He has no hearth, no roof, no family, no 


248 Napoleon the Little. 


belief, no book. He is a blind soul. His intelligence 
has never opened, for intelligence, like flowers, only opens 
to the light; and he is in darkness. However, he has to 
eat. Society has made a brute beast of him ; hunger has 
made a carniverous beast. He waits for foot-passengers at 
the corner of the wood, and tears away their purses. They 
take him and send him to the galleys. So far so good. 
Now, see this other man. It is no longer the red cap—it 
is the red robe. This one believes in God, reads Nicolle, 
is a jansenist, and devout, goes to confession, goes to get 
the blessed bread. He is well born, as they say ; nothing 
is wanting to him, nothing has ever been wanting to him ; 
his family have lavished everything on his childhood—cares, 
lessons, counsels, Greek and Latin literature, masters. He 
is a grave and scrupulous personage. Also, they have 
made a magistrate of him. Seeing this man pass his days 
in the meditation of all the great texts, sacred and profane, 
in the study of right, in the practice of religion, in the con- 
templation of the just and unjust, society has placed in his 
keeping those which are the most august and most vener- 
able objects which it possesses, the book and the law. It 
has made him judge and punisher of treason. It has said 
to him: ‘‘ A day may come, an hour may sound, which the 
chief with material force shall tread law and right under its 
feet; then thou, man of justice, thou shalt arise, and 
thou shalt strike with thy rod the man of power. For that, 
and expecting this perilous and supreme day, it heaps 
thee with benefits, and clothes thee with purple and ermine. ” 
That day is actually approaching; that hour unique, 
solemn, severe, that grand hour of duty. The man in the 
red robe begins to stammer the words of the law ; suddenly 


Napoleon the Little. 249 


he perceives that it is not justice which prevails, that it is 
treason which is carrying him away; and then, he, this man 
who has passed his life in illuminating, penetrating himself 
with the pure.and holy light of right, this man who is nothing 
if he is not the despiser of unjust success, this man of let- 
ters, this scrupulous man, this religious man, this judge to 
whom they have confided the keeping of the law, and ina 
certain degree of the universal conscience, turns toward 
the triumphant perjurer, and with the same mouth, with 
the same voice with which, if the traitor had been con- 
quered, he would have said, ‘‘ Criminal, I condemn you 
to the galleys,” says, ‘‘ My lord, I swear fidelity to you.” 
Take a balance. Put this judge in one scale, and that 
galley-slave in the other, and tell me on which side it goes 
down. 


CHVAIP AE Rs av okt 


OATH EVERYWHERE. 


Sucu are the things which have been seen in France on 
account of the oath to M. Bonaparte. They have sworn 
here, there, everywhere ; at Paris, at the east, at the west, at 
the north, at the south; it has been in France during all 
a great month, a tableau of arms stretched out, and of 
hands raised up; final chorus: Le/ us swear, ef. The 
ministers swore before the president, the prefects before the 
ministers, the mob before the prefects. 

What is M. Bonaparte doing with all these oaths? Is 
he making a collection of them? Where does he put 
them? It has been remarked that the oath has never been 
refused except by functionaries who are not remunerated ; 
the counsellors-general, for example. In reality, it is to the 
budget that they have taken oath. One heard, on the 29th 
of March last, a certain senator implore in a high voice 
against the omission of his name, which was in a certain 
sense an accidental modesty. M. Sibour,* archbishop of 
Paris, swore ; M. Franck Carré,+ procurer-general at the 
Court of Peers in the affair of Boulogne, swore; M. Du- 
pin, t president of the National Assembly on the second of 
December, swore. Oh, my God! it is enough to make 
one wring his hands with shame! It is, however, a holy 


- 


* As Senator. 
+ As first President of the Court of Appeals. 
{ As President of an agricultural precinct. 


Napoleon the Ltttle. 251 


thing, this oath! The man who makes an oath is no 
longer a man, he is an altar; God descends on him. 
Man, that infirmity, that shadow, that atom, that grain 
of sand, that drop of water, that tear fallen from the eyes 
of destiny; man so little, so weak, so uncertain, so igno- 
rant, and so restless; man who goes on in trouble and 
doubt, knowing little of yesterday and nothing of to-mor- 
row ; seeing just enough of his path to place his foot before 
him, the rest darkness ; man trembling if he looks before 
him, sad if he looks behind him; man enveloped in these 
immensities and these obscurities, time, space, being, and 
lost in them ; having a gulf within him, his soul, and a gulf 
without him, heaven; man who, at certain hours, bends 
down with a sort of sacred horror beneath all the forces of 
nature, under the sound of the sea, under the shivering of 
the trees, under the shadow of the mountains, under the 
beaming of the stars ; man, who cannot raise his head by 
day without being blinded by the light, by night without 
being crushed by the infinite; man, who knows nothing, 
who sees nothing, who hears nothing, who, perhaps, carried 
away to-morrow, to-day, this moment, by the wave which 
passes, by the wind which blows, by the flintstone which 
falls, by the hour which rings ; man, endowed for a day, 
this shivering, tottering, miserable being, the coral of 
chance, the plaything of the minute which is flying by, 
collects himself suddenly, before the enigma which they 
call human life, feels that there is in him something 
grander than the abyss, honour ; stronger than fatality, vir- 
tue ; deeper than the unknown, faith ; and alone, feeble, 
and naked, he says to all this awful mystery which holds 
him, and which envelopes him: ‘‘ Do with me what thou 


252 Napoleon the Little. 


wilt, but as for me, I will do this, and I shall not do that ;” 
and bold, serene, tranquil, creating with a word a fixed 
point in this sombre instability which fills the horizon ; as 
the sailor casts an anchor in the ocean, he casts his oath 
into the future. Oh, oath! Wonderful confidence of the 
just man in himself! Sublime permission to affirm, given 
by God to man! It is finished. There is no more of it. 
One more splendour of the soul has vanished ! 


BOOK EIGHTH. 





Sigs VO a el 
PROGRESS INVOLVED IN THE COUP D’ETAT. 


Amonc us, democrats, the event of the 2d of December 
struck many sincere minds with stupor. It has discon- 
certed some, discouraged others, filled several with conster- 
nation. I have seen some who cried: Fins Polonia! 

As for myself, since at certain moments it is necessary to 
say I, and to speak before history as a witness, I proclaim 
that I have seen this event without apprehension. I say 
more, there are moments when in presence of the 2d of 
December I declare myself satisfied. _ When I succeed in 
abstracting myself from the present, when it happens to 
be possible for me to turn away my eyes for an instant 
from these crimes, from this blood poured out, from all 
these victims, from all the proscribed, from these hulks 
where the imprisoned have the rattle already in the throat, 
from those frightful galleys at Lambessa and Cayenne, where 
they die quickly, from that exile, in which they die slowly, 
from that vote, that oath, this immense heap of shame put 
upon France, and which goes on increasing every day— 
when, forgetting for a few moments the melancholy 


254 Napoleon the Little. 


thoughts which habitually beset my mind, I succeed in 
enclosing myself within the severe indifference of the poli- 
tician, and in no longer considering the deed, but the con- 
sequences of the deed; then, among many disastrous results, 
no doubt, advance, real, considerable, enormous advance, 
appears to me, and in such a moment, if 1 am always one 
of those whom the 2d of December makes indignant, I am 
no longer one of those whom it afflicts. The eye is fixed 
on certain aspects of the future. I am able to say to my- 
self of it: ‘‘The act is infamous, but the fact is good.” 
They have tried to explain the inexplicable fact of the 
victory of the coup d’état in a hundred fashions :—Equilib- 
rium took place between the different resistances, which 
were possible, and they mutually neutralized each other;—the 
people were afraid of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie were 
afraid of the people;—the faubourgs hesitated before the resto- 
ration of the majority, fearing, wrongfully nevertheless, lest 
their victory might place that right which is profoundly 
unpopular in power ;—the shopkeepers recoiled before the 
red Republic ;—the people did not understand ; the mid- 
dle classes were evasive ;—the former said, ‘‘ whom are we 
going to have enter the legislative palace?” the latter said, 
‘‘whom are we going to see in the Hotel de Ville ?”—finally, 
the rude repression of June, 1848, the insurrection crushed 
by cannon-shots, the quarries, the casemates, the trans- 
portations; living and terrible recollection ;—and then: 
if one had been able to beat the recall !—if a single legion 
had turned !—if M. Sibour had been M. Affre, and had 
cast himself before the balls ofthe praetorians !—if the high 
court had not allowed itself to be chased away by a cor- 
poral !—if the judges had done as the representatives, and 


Napoleon the Little. 255 


if one had seen the red robes in the barricades as one saw 
the scarfs! if one single arrest had failed! if a regiment had 
hesitated ! if the massacre of the Boulevard had not taken 
place, or had gone ill for Louis Bonaparte! etc., etc. All 
that is true, however, it is that which has been which was 
tobe. Let us say it again, under this monstrous victory, and 
in its shadow, an immense and definite advance had been 
made. The 2d of December has succeeded, because in 
more than one point of view, I repeat it, it was well, perhaps, 
that it should succeed. All explanations are correct, and 
ail are vain. The invisible hand is mingled with it all. 
Louis Bonaparte has committed the crime ; Providence has 
brought about the result. It was really necessary that what he 
calls order should be brought to light in his logic. It was 
necessary that men should know well and know forever, that 
in the mouths of the men of the past that word, Order, sig- 
nifies false oath, perjury, pillage of the public money, civil 
war, courts-martial, confiscation, sequestration, transporta- 
tion, proscription, volleys of musketry, police censorship, 
the dishonour of the army, the reducing the people to a 
cipher, the abasement of France, a mute Senate, a tribune 
overthrown, the press suppressed, the policy of the guillo- 
tine, the throttling of liberty, the strangling of right, the 
violation of laws, the sovereignty of the sabre, massacre, 
treason, ambush. The sight which one has under his eyes 
is a useful sight. What one sees in France since the 2d of 
December, is the orgy of disorder. Yes, Providence is in 
this result. Consider it further. Fifty years ago the Re- 
public and the Empire were 4lling all imaginations, the 
first with its reflection of terror, and the last with its reflec- 
tion of glory. Of the Republic, one saw only 1793 ;‘ that 


256 Napoleon the Little. 


is to say, formidable revolutionary necessities, the furnace ; 
of the Empire, one only saw Austerlitz. Hence a preju- 
dice against the Republic, and a prestige for the Empire. 
But what is the future of France? Is it the Empire? No, 
it is the Republic. It was necessary to overthrow that 
situation, to suppress the prestige in that which could not 
revive, and to suppress the prejudice against that which is 
to be. Providence has done it. It has destroyed these two _ 
mirages. February has come, and has taken terror away 
from the Republic; Louis Bonaparte has come, and has 
taken the prestige from the Empire. 

From this time forth, 1848, fraternity, is laid down upon 
and covers up 1793, terror; Napoleon the Little is super- 
posed upon Napoleon the Great. 

The two great things, one of which terrified, and the 
other of which dazzled, draw back by one plan. One no 
longer perceives 1793 except across that which gives it 
justification, and Napoleon except across his caricature ; 
the foolish fear of the guillotine is dissipated, the vain 
imperial popularity has vanished. 

Thanks to 1848, the Republic no longer terrifies ; thanks 
to Louis Bonaparte, the Empire no longer fascinates. The 
future has become possible. These are the secrets of God. 
And further, the word Republic no longer satisfies ; it is 
the 4ding Republic that we need. Well, we shall have the 
thing with the word. Let us develope this. 


CHAPTER, LI. 


WHILE waiting for those marvellous but certain sim- 
plifications which will one day bring about the union of 
Europe and the democratic confederation of the Continent, 
what will be the form of that social edifice in France of 
whose indistinct yet luminous features the thinker catches 
a glimpse at present, across the darkness of dictatorships? 

That form will be this : the commune sovereign, manage- 
ment by an elected mayor ; universal suffrage everywhere, : 
subordinate to the national unity only in that which touches 
general acts. That is for the administration. The council of 
prosecuting officers and the committees of prud’hommes* 
regulating the private differences of associations and of 
industries ; the jury, the examining magistrate of facts, 
enlightening the judge, the magistrate deciding upon the 
right of facts; the judge elected. That is for justice. The 
priest outside of everything except the church, living with 
his eye fixed on his book, and on heaven; a stranger to 
the budget, ignorant of the State, known only to his faith- 
ful, having no longer authority, but having liberty. That is 
for religion. War limited to the defence of territory ; the 
nation, the national guard, divided into three sections, able 
to arise as one man. That is for power. The law always, 
the right always, the vote always ; the sabre nowhere. 


* Discreet men selected to arbitrate, 


258 Napoleon the Little. 


But, to this future, to this magnificent realization of the 
democratic ideal, what have been the obstacles ? 

There were four material obstacles; here they are; the 
standing army, the centralized administration, the clergy in 
secular office, the magistracy irremovable. 


CHAPT ER TLt. 


Wuat, these four obstacles are, what they were, even 
under the Republic of February, even under the Con- 
stitution of 1848, the evil that they were producing, the 
good that they were hindering, what past they were making 
permanent, and what excellent social order they were post- 
poning, the writer on the laws of nations was catching a 
glimpse of, the philosopher knew; the nation, with refer- 
ence to it, were totally ignorant. 

Those four institutions, enormous, ancient, solid, prop- 
ped up one against the other, mingled at their base and at 
their summit, crossing like a forest of grand old trees, with 
their roots under our feet, and their branches over our 
heads, stifled and crushed everywhere the scattered 
germs of new France. Where there would have been life, 
movement, association, local liberty, spontaneity in the 
communes, there was administrative despotism; where 
there would have been intelligent vigilance, armed when 
needed, on the part of the patriot and the citizen, there 
was the passive obedience of the soldier; where the living 
Christian faith might have struggled to burst out, there was 
the Catholic priest; where there might have been justice, 
there was the judge. And the future was there under the 
feet of suffering generations ; it could not come forth out 
of the earth, but which was waiting. 

Did they know that among the people? Had they any 
misgivings of such a thing? Did they divine it? No. Far 


260 Napoleon the Little. 


from it, in the eyes of the great majority, and of the middle 
classes in particular, these four obstacles were four sup- 
ports. Magistracy, army, administration, clergy, were the 
four virtues of order, the four social forces, the four holy 
columns of the ancient French formation. Attack that, if 
you dare! I do not hesitate to say it: in the state of 
blindness which prevailed in the best minds, with the 
methodic march of healthful progress, with our assem- 
blies, of which no one will suspect me of being a detractor, 
but which, when they are at once honest and timid, a 
thing which often happens, only allow themselves willingly 
to be governed by their own average—that is to say, their 
mediocrity ; with their committees for initiating proceed- 
ings, their delays, and their ballotings, if the 2d of Decem- 
ber had not come to bring its thundering demonstration, 
if Providence had not interfered in it, France would have 
remained indefinitely condemned to an irremovable magis- 
tracy, to administrative centralization to the standing army, 
and clerical office-holders. Assuredly, the power of the 
tribune and the power of the press combined, those two 
great forces of civilization, I am not the man to try to 
oppose and diminish them; but nevertheless, see how 
much effort would have been necessary, of every kind, in 
every sense, and under all forms, by the tribune and by the 
journal, by the book and by speech, in order to shake the 
universal prejudice favourable to those four fatal institutions ! 
How much, in order to succeed in overthrowing them ; to 
make evidence gleam before all eyes; to conquer interested 
resistance, passionate or totally unintelligent ; to enlighten 
profoundly public opinion, consciences, the official pow- 
ers; to make the quadruple reform penetrate into 


Napoleon the Little. 261 


ideas, and then into laws! Count the speeches, the writ- 
ings, the newspaper articles, the rough drafts of laws, the 
counter-drafts, the amendments, the amendments to amend- 
ments, the reports, the reports of the minorities, the facts, 
the incidents, the attacks, the discussions, the affirmations, 
the contradictions, the stories, the steps in advance, the 
steps in retreat, the days, the weeks, the months, the years, 
the quarters of a century, the half centuries, that would be 
necessary. 


CHAPTER GLY. 


I suppose on the benches of an assembly, the most in- 
trepid of thinkers, a brilliant‘mind, one of those men who, 
when they stand erect upon the tribune, rise into enthusiasm, 
grow suddenly grand, become colossal there, surpass by a 
whole head those massive semblances which mask realities, 
and see distinctly the future over the high and sombre wall 
of the present. This man, this orator, this seer, wishes to 
warn his country; this prophet wishes to enlighten the 
statesmen ; he knows where the rocks are; he knows that 
society will fall to pieces just on account of these four props 
for support: administrative centralization, the standing 
army, an irremovable judiciary, a salaried priesthood ; he 
knows it, he wishes that all should know it. He ascends 
the tribune; he says: ‘‘I denounce to you four great pub- 
lic perils. Your political system carries within it that 
which will kill it. It is necessary to transform the adminis- 
tration from foundation to roof, the army, the clergy, and 
magistracy ; to suppress here, to retrench there, to re-make 
everything, or to perish by these four institutions which you 
take as the elements of permanence, and which are the ele- 
ments of dissolution.” They murmur. He exclaims: 
‘Your centralized administration! do you know what it 
may become in the hands of a perjured executive power? 
An immense treason, executed at one moment over all the 
face of France, by the office-holders, without exception.” 

Murmurs break out anew, and with more violence. They 


Napoleon the Little. 263 


cry: ‘‘Order!” The orator continues: ‘‘Do you know 
what your standing army can become on any given day? 
An instrument of crime! Passive obedience is the bayonet 
forever charged at the heart of the law. Yes, here even, in 
this France, which is the initiative power of the world, in 
this land of the tribune and the press, in this native home 
of human thought; yes, an hour may sound when the 
sabre shall reign ; when you, inviolable legislators, will be 
seized by the collar by corporals ; when our glorious regi- 
ments will be transformed in the interests of one man, and, 
to the shame of the people, into gilded hordes and pretorian 
bands ; when the sword of France will be something which 
strikes from behind, like the poignard of the Italian assas- 
sin; when the blood of the first city of the world will 
splash the golden epaulettes of your generals.” 

The murmur becomes a tumult. They cry: ‘‘Order!” 
on all sides. They interrupt the orator: ‘‘ You have just 
insulted the administration, now you outrage the army.” 
The president calls the orator to order. The orator re- 
sumes: ‘‘And if there should arrive a day in which a man, 
having in his power the five hundred thousand office-hold- 
ers who constitute the administration, and the four hundred 
thousand soldiers who compose the army,—-if it should 
happen that this man should tear up the Constitution, vio- 
late all laws, infringe all oaths, outrage all rights, commit 
all crimes, do you know what your irremovable magistracy— 
the defender of the right, the guardian of laws—would do? 
It would turn traitor !” 

The clamours hinder the orator from completing his sen- 
tence. The tumult becomes a tempest. ‘‘This man re- 
spects nothing. After the administration and the army he 


« 


264 | Napoleon the Little. 


drags the magistracy inthe mud. Reprimand! reprimand!” 
The orator is reprimanded, and it is inscribed upon the 
record of proceedings. The president declares to him that 
if he continues the assembly will be consulted and the floor 
will be denied him. The orator pursues: ‘‘And your 
salaried clergy ! and your office-holding bishops! On the 
day when any pretender shall have employed the admin- 
istration, the magistracy, and the army in all these outrages, 
-—on the day when all these institutions shall drip with 
blood, shed by the traitor and for the traitor, placed between 
the man who shall have committed the crimes and the God 
who commands us to hurl anathemas at the criminal, do 
you know what they will do, your bishops? They will 
prostrate themselves, not before God, but before man /” 
Can one imagine the whoops, the melée of curses, which 

such words would receive? Can one imagine the cries, 
the rebukes, the threats, the entire assembly arising en 
masse, the tribune scaled, and scarcely protected by the 
attendants ?—The orator has successively profaned ali the 
sacred arks, and he has ended by touching the holy-of- 
holies—the clergy! And then what does he suppose? 
What a herd of impossible and infamous hypotheses !— 
Does not one hear Baroche growl from this place and Dupin 
thunder? The orator would be called to order, censured, 
fined, excluded from the chamber for three days, like Pierre 
Léroux and Emile de Girardin; who knows? even, perhaps, 
expelled like Manuel. And the next day the indignant 
bourgeois would say: “Well done!” And from all quar- 
ters the journals of order would shake their fists at the 
SLANDERER. And in his own party, on his own bench at the 
assembly, his best friends would abandon him and would 


Napoleon the Little. 265 


say: ‘‘It is his own fault; he has been wool-gathering ; he 
has supposed chimeras and absurdities!” And after his 
generous and heroic effort, he would discover that the four 
institutions attacked would be more venerable and infalli- 
ble than ever, and that the question, instead of having 
advanced, would have been retarded. 

12 


CHWPTEROWV: 


But Providence goes to work otherwise. He puts the 
things splendidly before your eyes, and tells you: see. A 
man comes some fine morning,—and what a man! the 
first come, the last come; without past, without future, 
without genius, without glory, without prestige, is he an 
adventurer? is he a prince? this man has simply his hands 
full of money, of bank notes, of shares, of railroad stock, 
of places, of decorations, of sinecures ; this man stoops 
to the functionaries, and says, ‘‘Functionaries, turn 
traitors.” The functionaries turn traitors. All? Without 
exception? Yes, all. He addresses the generals and says: 
‘*Generals, massacre.” The generals massacre. He turns 
to the irremovable judges, and says to them: ‘‘ Magis- 
tracy, I infringe the Constitution, I perjure myself, I 
dissolve the sovereign Assembly, I arrest the inviolable 
representatives, I pillage the public treasury, I seques- 
trate, I confiscate, I banish whoever displeases me, I 
transport at caprice, 1 mow down with grape-shot with- 
out summons, I shoot without sentence, I commit 
every deed which it is proper to call crime, I vio- 
late everything which it is proper to call mght. Look at 
the laws—they are under my feet.” ‘‘ We will pretend not 
to see,” say the magistrates. ‘‘ You are insolent,” replies 
the man of Providence. ‘‘To turn away your eyes is to 
outrage me. I intend that you should aid me. Judges, 
you are going to-day to congratulate me, who am farce and 


Napoleon the Little. 267 


crime ; and to-morrow those who have resisted me, those 
who are honour, right, law, you will judge, and you will 
condemn.” ‘The irremovable judges kiss his boot and set 
to work to prepare the affair of the troubles. They make 
oath to him, into the bargain. Then he perceives in a 
corner the clergy, endowed, gilded, crosiered, coped, 
mitred, and he says to them: ‘‘ Ah! you are there, arch- 
bishop. Come here! you are going to bless me all this.” 
And the archbishop strikes up his Magnificat. * 


* My soul doth magnify the Lord, 


CHAPTER 


An! what a striking and instructive thing! LZrudimini, 
Bossuet would say. The ministers imagined that they were 
dissolving the assembly! They were dissolving the admin- 
istration. The soldiers fired on the army and killed it. 
The judges thought to judge and condemn innocent men ; 
they judged and condemned to death the irremovable mag- 
istracy. The priests thought to chant an hosanna over 
Louis Bonaparte; they chanted a De profundis over the 
clergy. 


CHAPTER, VI. 


WueEn God wishes to destroy a thing, he charges that 
thing itself with the duty. All bad institutions in this 
world end in suicide. When they have weighed long 
enough on men, Providence does with them as the Sultan 
does with his viziers. He sends them a cord by a mute; 
they execute themselves. Louis Bonaparte is the mute of 
Providence. 

o1 


CONCLUSION.—FIRST PART. 





CEASE eae 


LITTLENESS OF THE MASTER, BASENESS OF THE SITUATION. 


BE calm, history has got hold of him. Nevertheless, if 
it flatters M. Bonaparte’s vanity to be seized by history ; if 
he should by chance have an illusion in his mind on the 
subject of his worth as a political villain, and one would 
actually suppose it, let him remove it; let him not go on 
imagining, that because he has heaped horrors on horrors, 
that he will ever hoist himself to the height of the great 
historical bandits. We have been wrong, perhaps, in a few 
pages of this book, here and there, in comparing him with 
these men. No; although he may have committed enor- 
mous crimes, he will remain paltry. He will never be any- 
thing but the nocturnal strangler of liberty ; he will never 
be anything but the man who has glutted the soldiers—not 
with glory, like the first Napoleon, but with wine; he will 
never be anything but the pigmy tyrant of a great people. 
The stamp of the individual is incompatible, thoroughly 
so, with grandeur, even grandeur in infamy. Dictator! he 
is a buffoon; let him make himself emperor—he will be 
absurd. 

He will accomplish ¢#7s. He will make the human 
race shrug their shoulders ; that will be his destiny. Will 


Napoleon the Little. 271 


he be less vigorously punished on that account? No. 
Disdain takes away nothing from anger; he will be hide- 
ous, and he will remain ridiculous. That is all. History 
laughs, and strikes him with a thunderbolt. 

The most indignant even will not save him from that. 
Great thinkers are delighted to chastise great despots, and 
sometimes even ennoble them somewhat in order to make 
them worthy of their fury ; but what do you want the his- 
torian to make of this personage? 

The historian will only be able to bring him before pos- 
terity, holding him by the ear. The man, once stripped of 
success—the pedestal taken away, the dust settled, the tin- 
sel and the glitter and the great sabre taken off, the poor 
little skeleton stripped naked and shivering with cold—and 
can one imagine anything more wretched and piteous? His- 
tory has its tigers. Historians, immortal keepers of fero- 
cious animals, show the nations this imperial menagerie. 
Tacitus alone, that great exhibitor of beasts, has taken and 
shut up eight or ten of these tigers in the iron cages of his 
style. Look at them ; they are frightful, grand, superb. 
Their spots make part of their beauty. This one is Nim- 
rod, the hunter of men; this one is Busiris, the tyrant of 
Egypt; this is Phalaris, who had living men cooked in a 
brazen bull, in order to make the bull bellow ; this is An- 
tiochus, who tore off the skin from the heads of the seven 
Maccabees and had them roasted alive; this is Nero, the 
burner of Rome, who covered the Christians with wax and 
with tar and lighted them like torches; this is Tiberius, 
the man of Caprera; this is one Domitian; this one, 
Caracalla; this one is Heliogabulus; and this one is Com- 
modus, who has this further merit in horror, that he was the 


27.2 Napoleon the Little 


son of Marcus Aurelius; these are the czars; these are 
the sultans; these are the popes; remark among them 
the tiger Borgia; here is Philip, called the Good, as the 
furies were called Eumenides; here is Richard III., sin- 
ister and deformed ; here is Henry VIII., with his large face 
and great stomach, who, of the five wives that he had, 
killed two and disembowelled one; here is Christiern II., 
the Nero of the North ; here is Philip II., the Demon of 
the South. They are frightful; hear them roar; examine 
them one by one. The historian brings them to you, drags 
them, furious and terrible, to the edge of the cage, opens 
their jaws for you, lets you see their teeth, shows you their 
claws ; you can say of every one of them: ‘‘ He is a royal 
tiger.” They have really been taken on all the thrones. 
History walks them across the centuries. She prevents 
them from dying ; she takes care of them. They are her 
tigers ; she does not mingle them with jackals. She keeps 
the unclean animals apart. M. Bonaparte will be with 
Claude, with Ferdinand VII. of Spain, with Ferdinand II. 
of Naples, in the cage of the hyenas. 

He is something of a brigand, and a good deal a rogue. 
One always smells in him the poor swindling prince, who 
lived on his wits in England; his actual prosperity, his 
triumph, his empire, and his inflation make no differ- 
ence ; that mantle trails over boots run down at the heels. 
Napoleon the Little; nothing more, and nothing less, 
The title of this book is good. The lowness of his vices 
injures the grandeur of his crimes. What could you 
expect? Peter the Cruel massacred, but he did not steal. 
Henry the Third assassinated, but he did not swindle. 
Timour crushed the children under the hoofs of horses, 


Napoleon the Little. 373 


about as M. Bonaparte exterminated the women and 
old men on the Boulevard, but he did not lie. Listen 
to the Arabian historian: “Timour Beig Sahebkeran 
(master of the world, and of the century, master of the 
planetary conjunctions), was born at Kesch, in 1336. He 
cut the throats of a hundred thousand captives, and when 
he was besieging Siwas, the inhabitants, in order to bend 
him, sent a thousand little children to him, carrying each 
a Koran on his head, and crying: ‘Allah! Allah!’ He 
had the sacred books taken away with respect, and had the 
children crushed under the feet of his horses. He em- 
ployed seventy thousand human heads, with cement, stone, 
and brick, to build towers at Heérat, at Sebzvar, at Tekrit, 
at Aleppo, at Bagdad. He detested falsehood. When he 
had given his word he could be trusted.” M. Bonaparte is 
not of that stature. He has not the dignity which the 
great despots of the east and west mingled with their 
ferocity. The Czsarian breadth is wanting. In order 
to make out a good appearance, and to present a suit- 
able style among these illustrious cut-throats, who have 
tortured humanity for four thousand years, one must not 
cause the mind of a beholder to hesitate between a gen- 
eral of division and the man who beats the big drum at 
the Champs-Elysées. It is not necessary to have been a 
policeman in London ; it is not necessary to have endured 
with downcast eyes, in full court of peers, the haughty 
contempt of M. Magnan ; it is not necessary to have been 
called pickpocket by the English journals ; it is not neces- 
sary to have been threatened with Clichy ; it is not neces- 
sary, in a word, that there should be anything of the rascal 
in the man. Monsieur Louis Napoleon, you are ambitious, 


274 Napoleon the Little. 


you aim high, but it is very necessary to tell you the truth. 
Well, what do you want us to make of it? It is in vain 
that you have realized, in your fashion, the wish of Cal- 
igula: ‘‘I could wish the human race had only one head, 
that I might behead them at a blow.” It is in vain that 
you have banished the Republicans by thousands, as Philip 
the Third expelled the Moors, and as Torquemada drove 
away the Jews; it is in vain that you have casemates like 
Peter the Cruel, hulks like Adrian, tortures like Mi- 
chael le Tellier, and trap-dungeons like Ezzelin III. ; it 
is in vain that you have been perjured, like Ludovico 
Sforza ; it is in vain that you have massacred and assassin- 
ated, en masse, like Charles IX. ; it is in vain that you 
have done each and all of these impressive things ; it is in 
vain that you have brought all those names to mind when 
one meditates on your name; you are onlyaknave. ‘‘He 
is not a monster who desires to appear one.” 


CUAr EER Ee: 


Out of every agglomeration of men, out of every city, 
out of every nation, there breaks out fatally a centralizing 
power. Put this centralizing force at the service of liberty ; 
have it regulated by universal suffrage, the city becomes a 
commune, the nation becomes a Republic. This central- 
izing force is not inherently intelligent—belonging to every- 
body, it belongs to nobody ; it floats, so to speak, on the 
outside of the people. Until the day when, according to 
the true social formula, which is the least government pos- 
sible, this force shall be reduced to be nothing but a police 
ef the street and of the road, paving the high-roaus, light- 
ing the street-lamps, and watching the malefactors, until 
that day, this centralizing force, being at the mercy of many 
chances and ambitions, needs to be guarded and defended 
by institutions which are jealous, ciear-sighted, well armed. 
It may be enslaved by tradition ; it may be surprised by 
ruse. A man may throw himself upon it, seize it, bridle it, 
subdue it, and make it tread onthe citizens. The tyrant is © 
that man who, emerging from tradition, like Nicholas of 
Russia, or from ruse, like Louis Bonaparte, takes posses- 
sion of this centralizing force of the people for his own 
profit, and disposes of it according to his own choice. 
This man, if he was from birth what Nicholas is, he is the 
social enemy ; if he has done what Louis Bonaparte has 
done, he is the public thief. The first has nothing to do 
with regular and legal justice, with the articles of codes. 
He has behind him the spy and the garroter, hatred in his 


276 Napoleon the Little. 


heart and vengeance in his hand, in his palace Orloff, and 
among his people Mouravieff ; he may be assassinated by 
any member of his army, or poisoned by a member of his 
family ; he runs the chance of the conspiracies of barracks, 
of the revolts of regiments, of secret military societies, of 
domestic plots, of sudden and obscure diseases, of terrible 
blows, of great catastrophes. The second ought simply to 
go to Poissy. The first has what is necessary in order to 
die in the purple, and to end pompously and royally as 
monarchies and tragedies finish ; the second ought to live— 
to live between four walls, behind gratings which permit 
him to be seen by the people, sweeping the courts, making 
brushes out of horse-hair or socks out of list, emptying tubs 
with a green cap on his head, with wooden shoes on his feet, 
and with straw in his wooden shoes. Ah! leading men of 
the old parties, men of the absolutism in France, you have 
voted en masse among the 7,500,000; outside of France 
you have applauded, and you have taken this Cartouche* 
for the hero of order. He is ferocious enough for that, I 
grant, but look at his height. Do not be ungrateful for 
your true colossii You have dismissed too soon your 
Haynausand your Radetzkys. Consider above all this com- 
parison which offers itself so naturally to the mind. What 
is this lilliputian mandarin compared with Nicholas, czar, 
and Czesar, emperor and pope—a power half Bible and half 
knout, + who damns and condemns, who commands 8¢o,000 
soldiers and 200,000 priests, holds in his right hand the keys 
of Paradise, and in his left the keys of Siberia, and possesses 
as his private property 60,000,000 of men—the souls as if 
he were God, the bodies as if he were the tomb. 


* Eminent bandit. + A Russian scourge. 


Grrr Tin tis: 


Un ess there shall be a catastrophe, sudden, imposing, 
and brilliant; if the actual situation of the French nation 
should be prolonged and become permanent, the great 
injury, the frightful injury would be the moral injury. 
The Boulevards of Paris, the streets of Paris, the fields and 
the cities of twenty-eight departments in France, were 
strewn, on the 2d of December, with slaughtered and pros- 
trate citizens; one saw before the thresholds fathers and 
mothers with their throats cut, children sabred, women with 
dishevelled hair wet with blood, ripped open by grape-shot ; 
one saw people who were begging for their lives massacred 
in the houses, some shot in heaps in their cellars, others 
dispatched with the bayonet on their beds, others brought 
down by a ball on the flagstone of their hearth: all sorts 
of bloody hands are still imprinted, even at this present 
hour, here on a wall, there on a door, there on an alcove ; 
after the victory of Louis Bonaparte, Paris trod for three 
days in a reddish mud ; a cap full of human brains was 
hung on a tree in the Boulevard des Italiens; I who write 
these lines, I saw, among other victims, on the night of 
the 4th, near the Mauconseil barricade, an old man with 
white hair stretched on the pavement, shot through the 
chest with an iron ball, and with his collar-bone broken ; 
the gutter of the street which flowed under him bore away 


his blood. I saw, I touched with my hands, I helped un- 
8% 


278 Napoleon the Little. 


dress a poor child of seven years of age, killed, they told 
me, in Tiquetonne-street ; it was pale, its head moved back- 
ward and forward from one side to the other while they 
were taking off its clothing; its half-opened eyes were fixed, 
and while stooping near its half-opened mouth one seemed 
to hear it still murmur: Mother! Well! there are things 
more heart-rending than this slain child, more mournful 
than that old man killed with grape-shot, more horrible 
than that rag filled with human brains, more frightful than 
these pavements red with carnage, more irreparable than 
the loss of these men and women, these fathers and 
mothers slaughtered and assassinated,—it is the honour of a 
great people which has vanished. Most certainly, those 
pyramids of the dead that they saw in the cemeteries after 
the wagons that came from the Champs de Mars were un- 
loaded ; those immense open ditches, that they filled in 
the morning with human bodies, making haste because 
the light was gaining upon the twilight, these were shock- 
ing ; but what is more frightful still, is to think that at the 
present hour the peoples are left in darkness, and that for 
them France, that great moral splendour, has disappeared ! 
What is more heart-rending than skulls cleft by the sabre, 
bosoms ploughed through with bullets, more disastrous 
than houses violated, than murder filling the streets, than 
blood poured into the gutters, is to think that now they 
are saying to themselves among all the peoples of the 
earth : You know well, that nation of nations, that people 
of the 14th of July, that people of the roth of August, that 
people of 1830, that people of 1848, that race of giants 
which crushed the fortresses, that race of men whose 
face gave light, that country of the human race which 


Napoleon the Little. 279 


produced heroes, which made all the revolutions, and 
brought forth all the children ; that France, whose name 
once meant liberty, that kind of soul of the world 
which shed its beams over Europe, that light—well ! 
somebody has walked over it and extinguished it. 
There is no longer any France. It is all over. Look— 
darkness everywhere! The world is groping. Ah, it was 
so grand! Where are those times, those beautiful seasons 
mingled with storms, but splendid when all was life, when 
all was liberty, when all was glory ? those times when the 
French nation, awaking before all, and standing erect in 
the darkness, with its forehead whitened by the day-break 
of the future already risen for her, said to the other peoples 
still on the ground, and in heaps, and scarcely moving 
their chains in their sleep: ‘‘ Be quiet ; I am doing what 
is necessary for all ; I am digging the earth forall ; lam 
the workman of God!” What deep sweetness! Look at 
this torpor, where there was once such power! Look at 
this shame, where there was once that pride! Look at 
the superb people, who were raising their heads, and who 
now abase it! Alas! Louis Bonaparte has done more 
than kill persons ; he has diminished souls ; he has lessened 
the heart of the citizen. It is necessary to belong to the 
race of the indomitable and invincible to persevere at this 
moment in the rough path of self-denial and of duty. I 
know not what gangrene of material prosperity is threaten- 
ing to make public honour fall into rottenness. Ah! what 
good fortune to be banished, to be fallen, to be ruined, is 
it not honest workmen? is it not worthy peasants hunted 
from France, and who have no asylum, and who have no 
shoes? What happiness to eat black bread, to lie on a 


280 Napoleon the Little. 


mattress thrown on the ground, to be out at elbows, to be 
beyond all that, and to those who say to you, ‘‘ You are 
Frenchmen,” to answer: ‘‘ Iam proscribed !” What misery 
is this joy of interests and cupidities, glutting itself in the 
trough of the 2d of December! Faith, let us live, let us 
attend to our business, let us job in zinc-stocks or in rail- 
roads, let us make money; it is not noble, but it is ex- 
cellent ; a scruple the less, a louis the more; let us sell 
our whole souls at this rate! They run, they rush, they 
make an ante-chamber, they swallow all shame, and if one 
cannot have a grant of a rood in France, or a grant of land 
in Africa, one asks fora place. A crowd of intrepid dev- 
otees besiege the Elysée, and group themselves around 
the man. Junot, near the first Bonaparte, braved the 
splashes of the shell; these, near the second, brave the 
splashes of mud. To partake of his infamy, what differ- 
ence does that make to them, provided that they partake 
of his luck? It is a question as to who will make this sale 
of himself most impudently, and among these beings there 
are young people who have the pure and limpid eye, and 
every appearance of the generous age; and there are old 
men, who have only one fear, and that is lest the place so- 
licited should not come in time, so that they may not be 
able to dishonour themselves before they die. One would 
give himself for a prefecture, another for a receipt, another 
for a consulate, another wants a tobacconist’s shop, another 
wants an embassage ; all want money, some more, some 
less, for it is of the salary, not of the duties that they think. 
Each one holds out his hands. All offer themselves. 
One of these days they will establish an assayer of 
conscience in money. 


Napoleon the Little. 281 


What! we have come to this! What, those very men 
who sustained the coup d’état, those very ones who were 
afraid of the red croquemitaine* and of the nonsense of the 
jacquerie in 1832; the very men who found this crime 
good, because, according to them it has drawn their 
stock, their notes, their cash, their portfolios, out of dan- 
ger; these very men do not understand that material 
interests, floating on the waters, would be, after all, only a 
sad waif in the midst of an immense moral shipwreck, 
and that it is of a situation frightful and monstrous that 
they say: ‘‘ All issaved, save honour !”’*} The words inde- 
pendence, enfranchisement, progress, popular pride, na- 
tional pride, French greatness, one can no longer pro- 
nounce in France. Chut! These words make too much 
noise ; let us walk on tiptoe, and speak low. We are ina 
sick man’s room. Whatis this man? He is the chief, he 
is the master; everybody obeys him. Ah, all the world 
respects him, then? No, all the world despises him. O 
situation ! And military honour, where isit? Don’t speak 
any more, if you please, of what the army did on the 2d of 
December, but of what they submit to at the present moment, 
of that which is at their head and on their head. Do you 
think of it? Dothey think ofit? O army of the Republic ! 
army whch has had for captains, generals paid four francs 
a day; army which has had for chiefs Carnot, austerity ; 
Marceau, disinterestedness; Hoche, honour; Kléber, devo- 
tion ; Joubert, worth ; Dessaix, virtue ; Bonaparte, genius ! 
O French army, poor unfortunate, heroic army, led astray 
following the lead of such men as those! What will they 
do with it? Where will they bring it?) In what way will 


*Nursery horror, Parody upon the words of Francis I, when he was taken, 


282 Napoleon the Little. 


they employ it? What parodies are we destined to see and 
hear? Alas! what are these men who command our regi- 
ments and who govern? The master we are acquainted 
with. This one, who has been minister, was going to 
be “seized” on the 3d of December, that is why he made 
the 2d. This other is the ‘‘ borrower’ of the twenty-five 
millions from the Bank. This other is the man of the 
ingots of gold. To this other, before he was a minister, 
‘a friend” said: ‘‘ Ah, you dupe us with your actions in the 
affair in question, that tires me. Lf there are to be swindles, 
count me in sure!’ That other, who has epaulets, has just 
been convicted of a sort of breach of trust. That other, 
who has also epaulets, received on the morning of the 2d 
of December, a hundred thousand francs to provide against 
possible events. He was only colonel; if he had been 
general he would have had more. This one, who is 
general, was a body-guard of Louis XVIII., and when he 
was on guard once behind the king’s arm-chair during 
mass, he cut off a gold tassel from the throne and put it in 
his pocket. They dismissed him from the guards for that. 
Assuredly they could raise a column to these men also, 
ex aere capto (with the money taken). This other, who is 
general of a division, embezzled fifty-two thousand francs, 
to the certain knowledge of Colonel Charras, in the con- 
struction of the villages of Saint-Andre and Saint-Hyppolyte, 
near Mascara. This one, who is general-in-chief, was sur- 
named, at Gand, where they were acquainted with him, Gen- 
eral Iive-hundred-francs. This one, who is minister-of-war, 
owes it entirely to the clemency of Gen. Rulliére that he 
was not brought before a court-martial. Such are the 
men. It is all the same. Forward! Drums beat, clarions 


Napoleon the Little. 283 


sound, banners float. Soldiers!* from the height of those 
pyramids the forty thieves look downon you. Let us ad- 
vance in this melancholy subject, and let us see all its 
sides. The mere sight of a fortune like that of M. Bona- 
parte placed at the summit of the State would be enough 
to demoralize a people. There are always,—in conse- 
quence of the defect of social institutions, which ought, 
before everything, to enlighten and to civilize,—there are 
always in a numerous population like that of France, a 
class which is ignorant, which suffers, which covets, which 
struggles, placed between the bestia] instinct which impels 
to take and the moral law which invites to work. In the 
mournful and oppressed condition in which it is at present, 
this class, in order to maintain itself in righteousness and 
in wealth, needs all the pure and holy lights which are sent 
forth from the gospel ; it needs that the mind of Jesus on 
the one side, and the mind of the French Revolution on 
the other, should address it in the same manly words, and 
show it, without ceasing, as the only lights worthy of the 
eyes of man, the high and mysterious laws of human des- 
tiny, self-denial, devotion, sacrifice, work which tends to 
material welfare, worth which tends to the inward welfare ; 
even with this perpetual teaching, at once divine and hu- 
man, this class, so worthy of sympathy and of fraterniza- 
tion, often succumbs. Suffering and temptation are stronger 
than virtue. Now, do you understand the infamous advice 
which the success of M. Bonaparte gives it? A man, poor, 
ragged, without resources, without work, is there in the 
shadow, at the corner of a street, sitting on a post; he is 
meditating and at the same time he is repelling a wicked 


* Parody on Napoleon I. in Egypt. 


284 Napoleon the Little. 


action ; at one moment he wavers, at another he holds 
himself upright; he is hungry, and he has a mind to 
steal ; in order to steal it is necessary to make a false key, 
it is necessary to scale a wall, and then, a false key made 
and the wall scaled, he will be before the strong box ; if 
any one awakes, if they resist him, it will be necessary to 
kill. His hair bristles, his eyes become haggard, his con- 
science, the voice of God, revolts within him, and cries to 
him: ‘‘Stop! that is wrong! those are crimes!” At this 
moment the chief of the State passes. The man sees M. 
Bonaparte, dressed as a general, with the red cord, and some 
lackeys in gold-laced livery, galloping toward his palace 
in a carriage with four horses; the unfortunate, uncertain 
before his crime, looks eageriy at this splendid vision, and 
the tranquillity of M. Bonaparte, and his gold epaulets, and 
the red cord, and the livery, and the palace, and the car- 
riage with four horses, say to him: ‘‘Succeed!” He 
fastens on the apparition; he follows it; he runs to the 
Elysée ; a guilded crowd rush after the prince. All sorts 
of carriages pass under that gate, and he catches a glimpse 
there of men happy and radiant. This one is an ambassa- 
dor. The ambassador looks at him, and says to him : ‘* Suc- 
ceed.” This one is a bishop. The bishop looks at him, 
and says: ‘‘Succeed.” This one is a judge. The judge 
looks and smiles at him, and says: ‘‘ Succeed.” So, to 
escape the gendarmes, that is henceforth the whole law. 
To steal, to pillage, to poignard, to assassinate—these are 
only bad if one has the stupidity to get taken. Every man 
who meditates a crime has a constitution to violate, an 
oath to break, in a word, an obstacle to destroy. Choose 
your measures well. Be clever. Succeed. There are no 


~ 


Napoleon the Little. 285 


crimes, but blunders. You put your hand into the pocket 
of a passer-by, in the evening, at night-fall, in a deserted 
place. He seizes you; you let go; he arrests you, and 
takes you to the station-house. ~ You are guilty. To the 
galleys! You do zo/ relax your hold. You have a knife 
on you ; you stick it into the man’s heart ; he falls. There, 
he is dead ; now, take away his purse, and goaway. Bravo! 
it is a thing well done. You have shut the victim’s mouth, 
the only witness who could speak. They have nothing to 
say to you. If you had done nothing but rob the man, 
you would have been wrong; kill him, you are right. 
Succeed ; everything is in that. Ah, this is terrible! The 
day when the human conscience shall be put out of coun- 
tenance, the day when success shall be more righteous 
than it, all will be over; the last moral gleam will re- 
ascend to heaven. It will be night in the soul of man. 
You will have nothing further to do but to devour your- 
selves, ferocious beasts! With moral degradation political 
degradation is joined. M. Bonaparte treats the people of 
France like a conquered country. He effaces the Repub- 
lican inscriptions ; he cuts down the trees of liberty, and 
makes fagots of them. There was a statute of the Repub- 
lic on Bourgogne square, he put the mattock to it. There 
was a figure of the Republic crowned with ears of wheat on 
the coin; M. Bonaparte replaces it with the profile of M. 
Bonaparte. He has his bust crowned and harangued in 
the markets, as the bailiff Gessler had his cap saluted. 
Those clowns of the Faubourgs had the habit of singing in 
chorus, in the evening, returning from work. They sang 
the great Republican song, the ‘‘ Marseillaise,” the ‘* Chant 


” 


du Départ;” an injunction was laid on them to hold their 


286 Napoleon the Little. 


tongues ; the men of the Faubourgs will sing no more ; there 
is amnesty only for obscenities and drunken songs, The tri- 
umph is such that one is no longer inconvenienced. Yester- 
day they were still hiding ; they were shooting by night. 
It was from horror; but it was also from modesty. It 
was a remnant of respect for the people. They seemed 
to suppose that there were still enough alive to revolt 
if they saw such things. To-day they show themselves, 
they are no longer afraid; they guillotine in open day. 
Whom do they guillotine? Whom? The men of the 
law, and justice is there. Whom? The men of the peo- 
ple, and the people are there. That is not all: there is a 
man in Europe who strikes Europe with horror ; this man 
has put Lombardy to the sack, he has erected the gallows 
for Hungary, he has had women lashed on the public 
squares—he called that to hand-whip them, and in his eyes 
it was clemency. After one of these executions, the hus- 
band of one of these women killed himself The terrible 
letter in which the woman, Mme. Maderspach, recounts 
the deed, is still remembered. She says: ‘‘Mly heart has 
turned to stone!” At Brescia,—it is Gen. Pepe who relates 
the fact in his memoirs,—this man had the cannon rammed 
with the arms of women and the heads of infants in the 
style of bullets, and he sent these arms and these heads to 
the fathers and the husbands who were fighting in the barri- 
cades! Last year this man desired to visit England, as a 
tourist. While he was in London, he took it into his head 
to go into a brewery—the brewery of Barclay and Perkins, 
There he was recognized ; a voice murmured : ‘‘It is Hay- 
nau.” ‘‘It is Haynau!” repeated the workmen. It wasan 
affrighting cry. The crowd rushed on the wretch, tore out 


‘apoleon the Little. 287 


his infamous white hair by handfuls, spit in his face, and 
flung him out of doors. Well, that old bandit in epau- 
lets, this Haynau, this man who still wears on his cheek 
the immense insult of the English people, has been invited, 
it is announced, by my lord the prince-president, to visit 
him in France. It is quite right: London had done him 
an insult; Paris owes himan ovation. It isanamends. Be 
it so. We shall assist at that. Haynau recoiled from the 
maledictions and the whoops at the Perkins brewery; he 
will go for some flowers at the brewery St. Antoine. The 
Faubourg Saint Antoine will receive the order to be 
wise. The Faubourg St. Antoine, mute, motionless, 
passive, will see passing by, with an air of triumph, and 
chatting like two friends, in the old revolutionary streets, 
one in French uniform, the other in that of Austria, Louis 
Bonaparte, the butcher of the boulevard, giving his arm to 
Haynau, the lasher of women...... Go on, continue, 
add affront to affront, disfigure this France fallen upon her 
back on the pavement! Make her unrecognizable! crush 
the face of the people under your heel! Oh! inspire me 
with a plan, search for me, give me, find me, a means, 
whatever it may be, by the poignard, which I do not desire ! 
A Brutus for this man! pshaw! he does not even deserve 
Louvel! Find me a means, whatever it may be, to hurl 
this man down, and to deliver my country! to cast this 
man down !—this man of subterfuge, this man of lies, this 
man of success, this man of misfortune !——a means, the first 
that presents, pen, sword, paving-stone, revolt by the people, 
by the soldiers ; yes, whatever it may be, provided it is loyal 
and in open day, I take it, we all take it—we the pro- 
scribed,—if it can re-establish liberty, deliver the Republic, 


288 Napoleon the Little. 


raise up our country from shame, and make this imperial 
ruffian, this prince pickpocket, this outsider among kings, 
this traitor, this master, this performer of Franconi! this 
manager radiant, immovable, satisfied, crowned with his 
happy crime, who goes and comes, walks peaceable across 
quivering Paris, and who has everytaing on his -ide—every- 
thing, the exchange, the shop, the magistracy, all influences, 
all cautious feelings, all prayers, from that in the name of 
the soldier’s God to the Te Deum of the priest. Oh, I say, 
that there was some to make this succéssful wretch go again 
into his dust, into his oblivion, into his ditch! Surely when 
one has fixed his gaze too long on certain aspects of this sight, 
there are hours when a sort of vertigo would seize the strongest 
minds, But, nevertheless, does this Bonaparte do himself jus- 
tice? Has he a gleam, an idea, a suspicion, any perception 
whatever of his infamy? Really one is forced to doubt it. 
Yes, sometimes, at the proud words which escape him, when 
one sees him address incredible appeals to posterity, into that 
posterity which will quiver with horror and with anger 
over him, when you hear him speak with coolness of his 
“‘legitimacy,” and of his ‘‘ mission,” one would be almost 
tempted to believe that he had succeeded in taking himself 
into his own high consideration, and that his head was 
turned to that degree that he no longer perceives what he 
is, nor what he does. He believes in the adhesion of 
workmen, he believes in the good-will of kings, he believes 
in the feast of the Eagles, he believes in the harangues of 
the council, he believes in the benedictions of bishops, 
he believes in the oath that he has had sworn, he _ be- 
lieves in the seven million five hundred thousand votes! 
He speaks to this hour, feeling himself in the humour 


Napoleon the Little. 289 


of Augustus, of granting amnesty to the proscribed. 
Usurpation giving amnesty to honour! Cowardice giving 
amnesty to courage! Crime giving amnesty to virtue! He 
is so besotted with his success that he finds everything per- 
fectly simple. Odd effect of drunkenness! Optical illu- 
sion! He sees this thing of the fourteenth of January 
gilded, splendid, radiant ; the Constitution soiled with mud, 
stained with blood, ornamented with chains, dragged away 
in the midst of the shouts of Europe, by the police, the 
Senate, the Corps Legislatif, and the Council of State, bound 
anew with iron! He takes this hurdle, on which, standing 
erect, hideous and with a lash in his hand, he carries the 
bleeding corpse of the Republic, for a chariot of triumph, 
and wishes to have it pass under the arch de 1’Etoile ! 
13 


SECOND PART. 





CHAPTER ME: 
MOURNING AND FAITH, 


ProvipENcE brings men, things, and events to maturity 
by the simple fact of universal life. It is sufficient in order 
that an old world should vanish, for civilization ascending 
majestically toward its solstice to beam on old insti- 
tutions, old prejudices, old laws, old manners. This 
radiancy burns the past and devours it. Civilization 
enlightens, that is the evident fact, and at the same time 
it consumes, that is the mysterious fact. Influenced by 
it, slowly and without jolt, what is to decline declines, and 
what is to grow old grows old; wrinkles come to the 
things condemned, to the castes, to the codes, to the 
institutions, to the religions. This work of decrepitude, 
in a certain way, goes on of its own accord ;—fruitful 
decrepitude, under which new life springs up. Little by 
little the ruin is preparing ; deep crevices, that one does 
not see, branch out in the shadow and reduce to dust the 
interior of that venerable structure, which still looks mass- 
ive on the outside ; and it is thus that some fine day, sud- 
denly, this antique collection of worm-eaten facts, of which 


decrepid societies are formed, will become a deformity ; the 
II 


Napoleon the Little. 291 


edifice will become disjointed and unnailed, and bulge out. 
Then nothing has any further support. Let one of those 
giants which are natural to revolutions come suddenly on ; 
let this giant raise his hand and the story is told. 

There is a certain hour in history when a push of Dan- 
ton’s elbow would make Europe totter. 

Eighteen hundred and forty-eight was one of those hours. 
Old feudal Europe, monarchical, papal, patched up so 
fatally for France in 1815, tottered. But Danton missed. 
The sinking did not take place. They said a good deal, 
in the hackneyed phraseology which is employed in such 
cases, viz., that 1848 had opened a gulf. Notatall. The 
corpse of the past was on Europe; is it there yet. 1848 
opened a grave to throw that corpse in. It is this grave 
which they have mistaken fora gulf. In 1848 all that held 
to the past, all that. was living on the corpse, saw this grave 
close by. Notonly the kings on their thrones, the cardinals 
under their hats, the judges in the shadow of their guillotines, 
the captains on their war horses, were moved ; but whoever 
had any interest whatsoever in that which was going to 
disappear ; whoever was nursing in his own interest a 
social fiction; whoever had an abuse to let or to lease; 
whoever was guardian to a lie, doorkeeper to a prejudice, 
or contractor to a superstition ; whoever speculated, lent 
on usury, ground down, lied; whoever sold with false 
weights, from those who altered balances to those who 
falsified the Bible; from the bad shopkeeper, from those 
who manipulate the figures, to those who coin the miracles, 
all, froma certain banker Jew, who thinks himself somewhat 
of a little Catholic, to a certain bishop who becomes some- 
thing of a Jew, all these men of the past leaned their heads 


292 Napoteon the Little. 


against each other and trembled. That grave which was’ 
yawning, and where all fictions, their treasure, which had 
loaded down man for so many centuries had failed to fall, 

they resolved to fill. They resolved to wall it up, and to heap 
stone and rock upon it, and to set up on this heapa gibbet, and 
to hang on this gloomy and bloody gibbet that great culprit, 

Truth. They resolved to make an end, once for all, of 
the spirit of freedom and emancipation, and to tread down 
and compress forever the ascensional force of humanity. 

The enterprise was rude. What this enterprise was we have 
indicated already, more than once, in this book and else- 
where. To undo the work of twenty generations, to kill three 
centuries in the nineteenth century, namely, the sixteenth, 

seventeenth, and eighteenth,—that is to say, Luther, Des- 
cartes, and Voltaire—to stifle religious inquiry, philosophical 
inquiry, universal inquiry; to crush in a]l Europe that im- 
mense vegetation of free thought—-a great oak here, a sprig of 
herb there ; to marry the knout—Russian scourge—and the 
aspergile ;* to put more Spain in the south and more Russia 
in the north; to resuscitate all that one can of the inquisi- 
tion, and to stifle all that one can of intelligence; to stupefy 
youth—in other words, to besot the future; to make the 
world assist at the auto-da-fé of ideas; to throw the tri- 
bune over, to suppress the newspaper, the post-bill, books, 

speech, the cry, the murmur, the breath ; to make silence ; 
to pursue thought into the case of the printing-shop, into 
the composing-stick, into the lead type, into the stereotype 
and the stereotype-plate, into the lithographic-office, into 
the image, on the theatre, on the stage, into the mouth of 


* Brush for holy-water. 


Napoleon the Little. 293 


the actor, into the copy-book of the schoolmaster, into the 
pack of the colporteur ; to give to every one for faith, for 
law, for aim, and for God, material interest; to say to the 
peoples : eat, and think no more ; to take the brain out of 
the man and put it in his stomach ; to extinguish individual 
initiative, local life, national impulse, all the deep instincts 
that push man toward the right; to annihilate this I of 
nations that they call country ; to destroy nationality among 
peoples divided and dismembered, the Constitutions in con- 
stitutional States, the Republic in France, liberty every- 
where ; to put the foot on human effort everywhere. In a 
word, to close this abyss which they call progress. Such 
was the plan, vast, enormous, European, which nobody 
conceived, for not one of those men of the old world had 
the genius for it; but which all followed. As to the plan 
in itself, as to this immense idea of universal pressure, 
whence does it come? Who could tell? They saw it in 
the air. It appeared beside the past. It enlightened cer- 
tain souls, it showed certain routes. It was like a glimmer 
coming out of the tomb of Machiavelli. At certain mo- 
ments in human history, at things which happen, it seems 
as if all the old demons of humanity—Louis XL., Philip IL, 
Catharine de Medicis, the Duke of Alva, Torquemada— 
are somewhere there, in a corner, sitting around a table 
and holding council. One looks, one searches, and in 
place of Colossi one finds abortion, where one supposed 
the Duke of Alva, one finds Schwartzenburg, where 
one supposed Torquemada, one finds Veuillot. The 
ancient European despotism continues its march with those 
little men, and advances always; it resembles the Czar 
Peter on the road. ‘‘ One relays with what one finds,” wrote 


294 Napoleon the Little. 


he; ‘‘when we had no more Tartar horses we took asses.” In 
order to attain this object, the compression of everything and 
of everybody, it was necessary to set to work in a way obscure, 
winding, rugged, and difficult ; they set to work at it thus. 
A few of those who entered into it there knew what they were 
about. Parties live on words ; these men, these ringleaders 
that 1848 frightened and bantered, had, as we have said above, 
found their words ; religion, family, property ; they specu- 
lated with that vulgar address which is sufficient when one 
speaks to fear, on certain obscure aspects of what they called 
Socialism. The question was how to ‘‘save religion,” 
property, and the family. ‘‘ Follow the flag!” said they. 
The crowd of imbettered interests rushed there ; they coa- 
lesced, they formed a front, they consolidated, they gathered 
a crowd aroundthem. This crowd was composed of differ- 
ent elements. The landlord went into it because his rents 
had fallen ; the peasant because he had paid the forty-five 
centimes ; he who did not believe in God thought it neces- 
sary to serve religion, because he had been forced to sell his 
horses. They took from this crowd the force which it con- 
tained and made use of it. They made pressure with every- 
thing—with the law, with arbitrary power, with the assem- 
blies, with the jury, with the magistracy, with the police, in 
Lombardy, with the sabre at Naples, with the galleys in 
Hungary, with the gibbet. In order to remuzzle intelli- 
gences, to put minds again in chains like escaped slaves, 
in order to hinder the past from disappearing, in order to 
hinder the future from being born, in order to remain 
kings, the powerful, the privileged, the fortunate, everything 
became good, everything became just, everything became 
legitimate. They fabricated for the wants of the strug- 


Napoleon the Little. 295 


gle, and they scattered in the world a garroter’s morality 
against liberty, a morality which Ferdinand put in practice at 
Palermo and Antonelli, at Rome, Schwartzenburg, at Mil- 
an, and at Pesth, and later, at Paris, the men of December, 
those wolves of state. There was a people among the 
peoples who were a sort of elder brother in this family of 
the oppressed, who were like a prophet in the tribe of man. 
That people had the initiative in all human movement. 
They went, they said ‘‘Come,” and one followed them. 
How completely in addition to the fraternity of men which 
is in the gospel they taught the fraternity of nations. That 
nation spoke by the voice of its writers, of its poets, of its 
philosophers, of its orators as by one single mouth, and its 
words went away to the end of the world, to place them- 
selves as tongues of fire on the foreheads of all peoples. 
It presided at the Lord’s supper of the intelligent, it multi- 
plied the bread of life to those who were wandering in the 
desert. One day a tempest had enveloped it; it trod on 
the abyss, and said to the frightened peoples: ‘‘ What do 


, 


you fear?” The wave of revolutions, raised up by it, 
grew smooth under its feet, and, so far from engulfing it, 
glorified it! The nations, sick, suffering, and infirm, 
pressed around it. This one was limping ; the chain of 
the Inquisition, rivetted about its ankle, for three centuries 
had disabled it ; it said to it, ‘‘ Walk,” and it walked. The 
other was blind. The old Roman papacy had filled its 
eyeballs with fog and with night ; it said to it, ‘‘See.” It 
opened its eyes and saw. ‘‘Cast away your crutches, that 
is to say, your prejudices,” said it, ‘‘cast away your 
mists, that is to say, your superstitions, hold fast to your 
rights, raise your head, look at the heavens, look at the 


296 Napoleon the Little. 


sun, contemplateGod. The future isyours. Oh, peoples, 
you have a leprosy, ignorance; you have a pestilence, 
fanaticism ; there is not one of you who does not have and 
does not spread one of those frightful diseases which they 
call a despot. Go, walk, break the bonds of wickedness ; 
I deliver you, I heal you !” 

There was throughout all the land a clamour of recogni- 
tion from peoples whom this word was making healthy and 
strong. One day it approached dead Poland ; it raised its 
finger and cried to her: ‘‘ Arise!” Dead Poland arose. 
This people, the men of the past, whose fall it announced, 
derided and hated. By force of ruse and crooked pa- 
tience and audacity they ended by seizing it, and finally 
succeeded in strangling it. For more than three years the 
world has assisted at an immense personal torment, at a 
frightful spectacle. For more than three years the men of 
the past—the scribes, the Pharisees, the publicans, the 
chief-priests have been crucifying, in the presence of the 
human race, the Christ of peoples, the people of the 
French. Some furnished the cross, others the nails, others 
the hammer. Falloux put on its forehead the crown of 
thorns. Montalembert pressed to his lips the sponge 
of gall and vinegar. Louis Napoleon is the wretch 
who pierced its side with the spear, and made it 
utter that last cry: ‘‘Eli! Eli! lamma_ sabachthani !” 
Now it is finished. The French race is dead. The grea 
tomb is going to open for three days. * 





* The translator cannot believe that tne author meant here to utter 
blasphemy. The passage is only a very strong presentation of the com- 
mon theological statement, that Christ suffers in the person of his people. 


GHAPTER Ii 


Let us have faith. No, let us not allow ourselves to be 
crushed. To despair istodesert. Let us look at the future. 
The future—one does not know what tempests separate us 
from the port ; but the port, radiant, though distant, is in 
view ; the future, let us repeat it, is the Republic for all ; let 
us add, the future is peace with all. Let us not fallinto the 
vulgar whim and dishonour the century in which we live. 
Erasmus called the sixteenth century the ‘‘ excrement of 
times,” /ex femporum ; Bossuet thus characterizes the seven- 
teenth century: ‘‘A time wicked and small ;” Rousseau 
stigmatizes the eighteenth century in these terms: ‘‘ This 
great rottenness in which we live.” Posterity has decided 
against these illustrious minds. She has said to Eras- 
mus, ‘‘ The sixteenth century is grand ;” she has said to 
Bossuet, ‘‘The seventeenth century is grand ;” she has said 
to Rousseau, ‘‘The eighteenth century is grand.” The 
infamy of these centuries must have been real, yet 
these strong men were wrong in complaining. The 
thinker ought to accept with simplicity and calmness 
the centre in which Providence has placed him. The 
splendour of the human intelligence, the elevation of 
human genius does not shine less by contrast than by har- 
mony with times. The stoical and profound man is not 


debased by baseness aroundhim. Virgil, Petrarch, Racine, 
13* 


298 Napoleon the Little. 


are great in their purple; Job is greater on his dunghill. 
But we can say it, we men of the nineteenth century, the 
nineteenth century is not a dunghill. Whatever may be 
the shames of the present instant, whatever may be the 
blows by which the shifting gear of events may strike us, 
whatever may be the apparent desertion or the momentary 
lethargy of minds, none of us democrats will disown this 
magnificent epoch in which we live, the masculine age of 
humanity, Let us proclaim this aloud, let us proclaim it 
in our fall and in our overthrow, this century is the grand- 
est of centuries ; and do you know why? because it is the 
sweetest. This century, the immediate and the first issue 
of the French Revolution, freed the slave in America, 
elevated the parias in Asia, extinguished the funeral-pile in 
India, and crushed the last firebrands at the martyr’s stake 
in Europe; is civilizing Turkey, is causing the gospel to 
penetrate even to the refutation of the Koran, elevates 
woman, subordinates the right of might to the might of 
right, suppresses piracies, softens suffering, makes the gal- 
leys wholesome, throws the red branding-iron into the 
sewer, condemns the death penalty, takes the ball from 
the foot of the galley-slave, abolishes corporal punishment, 
degrades and dishonours war, takes the edge away from the 
Dukes of Alva and the Charles the Ninths, tears out the 
claws of tyrants. 

This century proclaims the sovereignty of the citizen and 
the inviolability of life; it crowns the people and conse- 
crates man. In art it has all varieties of genius: writers, 
orators, poets, historians, publicists, philosophers, painters, 
statuaries, musicians; majesty, grace, power, strength, 
brilliancy, depth, colour, form, style. It reinvigorates 


Napoleon the Little. 299 


itself at once in the real and in the ideal, and carries in its 
hand those two thunderbolts, the true and the beautiful. 
In science it performs every miracle ; it makes saltpetre out 
of cotton, of steam a horse, of the voltaic pile a workman, 
of the electric fluid a messenger, of the sun a painter; it 
waters itself with subterranean waters till it warms itself 
with central fire; it opens on the two infinites those two 
windows, the telescope on the infinitely great, the micro- 
scope on the infinitely little, and it finds in the first abyss 
stars, and in the second insects, which prove God to it. It 
suppresses duration, it suppresses space, it suppresses suf- 
fering ; it writes a letter from Paris to London, and it has 
the answer in ten minutes; it amputates a man’s thigh 
while the man is singing.and smiling. It has only to 
realize—and it is close upon it—a progress which is 
nothing at the side of the other miracles which it has 
already done; it has only to find the means to propel in 
a mass of air a bubble of air still lighter; it has already 
secured the air-bubble, and it holds it imprisoned ; it has 
only to find the impelling force, only to make the vacuum 
before the balloon, for example, only to burn the air before 
it, as the rocket would ; it has only to resolve in some such 
way this problem, and it will resolve it; and do you know 
what will happen then? At that very instant frontiers will 
vanish, barriers will retire, everything which is a Chinese 
wall around thought, around commerce, around industry, 
around nationalities, around progress, will crumble; in 
spite of censorship, in spite of the index, it will rain books 
and journals everywhere ; Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau will 
fall in hail on Rome, on Naples, on Vienna, on St. Peters- 
burg ; human speech is manna and the serf will pick it up 


300 Napoleon the Little. 


in the furrow ; fanaticisms will die, oppression will be im- 
possible ; man crawls along the earth, he escapes ; civiliza- 
tion will make herself a flock of birds and fly away, and go 
whirling, and light joyously on all points of the globe at 
once. Stop! there she is, she is passing ; point your can- 
non, old despotisms, she disdains you ; you are only the 
bullet, she is the lightning ; no more hatreds, no more in- 
terests mutually annulling one another, no more wars; a 
sort of new life, made up of concord and light, carries 
away and pacifies the world; the fraternity of peoples 
crosses space and communes in the eternal azure, men are 
mingled in the heavens. Until this last progress, see the 
point to which this century has brought civilization. 
Formerly there was a world where one walked with slow 
steps, with back bent, with head hung down; a world 
in which Count Gouvon had himself served at table by Jean 
Jacques ; in which the Chevalier de Rohan struck Voltaire 
with his cane ; in which they delivered Daniel De Foe to 
the pillory; in which a city like Dijon was separated from 
a city like Paris by dangers which made it proper to make 
your will; thieves at all the corners of the woods, and ten 
days of stage-coach to endure ; in whicha book was a kind 
of infamy and filth, which the executioner burnt on the 
steps of the Palace of Justice ; a world in which superstition 
and ferocity gave each other their hands; in which the 
pope said to the emperor : ‘‘Jungamus dexteras, gladium gla- 
dio copulemus ,;’ in which one met at every step crosses on 
which amulets were hanging, and gibbets on which hung 
men ; in which there were heretics, Jews, and lepers ; in 
which houses had battlements and loop-holes; in which 
they closed the streets with a chain, the rivers with a chain, 


Napoleon the Little. eR 


the camps themselves with a chain, as at the battle of 
Tolosa ; in which they surrounded cities with walls, king- 
doms with prohibitions and penalties; in which, except 
authority and force, which kept close together, everything 
was penned off, partitioned out, cut up, divided, hewn in 
pieces, hated and hating, scattered and dead; men dust, 
power block. ‘To-day there is a world in which all is 
living, united, combined, paired, blended ; a world in 
which reign thought, commerce, industry; in which poli- 
tics, more and more developed, tend to blend with science ; 
a world in which the last scaffolds and the last cannons 
hasten to cut off their last heads, and to vomit forth their 
last shells ; a world in which light increases at every min- 
ute ; a world in which distance has disappeared, in. which 
Constantinople is nearer Paris than Lyons was a hundred 
years ago; in which America and Europe throb at the 
same heart-beat ; a world, all circulation and all love, whose 
brain is France, whose arteries are railroads, and whose 
nerves are electric wires. Do you not see that simply to 
describe such a situation is to explain everything, to de- 
monstrate everything, to resolve everything? Do you not 
see that the old world had, as a fatal fault, an old soul— 
tyranny, and that into the new world there is about to de- 
scend, necessarily, irresistibly, divinely, a young sou]— 
liberty? That was the work which had created among 
men the nineteenth century, and which was continuing 
it splendidly, that century of baseness, decrease, and of 
decadence, as the pedants, the rhetoricians, the im- 
beciles call it, and all that unclean horde of bigots, 
of rogues, and knaves who slaver sanctimonious gall 
upon glory, who declare that Pascal is a fool, that 


302 Napoleon the Little. 


Voltaire is a fop, and Rousseau a brute, and whose 
triumph it would be to put a fool’s cap on the human race. 
You speak of the Lower Empire? Seriously? Did the 
Lower Empire have behind it John Huss, Luther, Cer- 
vantes, Shakespeare, Pascal, Moliére, Voltaire, Montes- 
quieu, Rousseau, Mirabeau? Did the Lower Empire have 
behind it the taking of the Bastile, the Confederation, 
Danton, Robespierre, the Convention? Did the Lower 
Empire have America? Did the Lower Empire have uni- 
versal suffrage? Did the Lower Empire have those two 
ideas, country and humanity ; country, the idea which 
enlarges the heart ; humanity, the idea which enlarges the 
horizon? Do you know that under the Lower Empire 
Constantinople was falling into ruins, and ended by having 
no more than 30,000 inhabitants? Is Paris as far gone as 
that ? 

Because you have seen a pretorian attack succeed, you 
declare yourselves the Lower Empire! That is said 
hastily, and loosely considered ; but reflect, then, if you 
can. Did the Lower Empire have the compass, the gal- 
vanic battery, the printing press, the newspaper, the 
locomotive, the electric telegraph? So many wings, 
which carried. man along, and which the Lower Em- 
pire did not have? Where the Lower Empire crept, 
the nineteenth century soars. Do you reflect? What! 
shall we see again the Empress Zoe, Romanus, Argy- 
rus, Nicephorus the Logothete, Michael Calaphate? 
Come, then! Do you think that Providence repeats him- 
self dully? Do you think that God is a tautologist ? Let 
us have faith! Let us say something positive. Irony 
of itself is the beginning of baseness. It is in affirming 


Napoleon the Little. 303 


that one becomes good; it is in affirmation that one be- 
comes great. Yes, the emancipations of intelligences, and 
consequently the emancipations of peoples, was the sub- 
lime task which the nineteenth century was accomplishing 
in co-operation with France, for the doubly providential 
work of time and of men, of repining and of action, was 
blending itself in the common effort, and the great epoch 
had for its home the great nation. Oh, country! at 
this hour, in which thou art there bloody, lifeless, with thy 
head abased, thine eyes closed, with thy mouth open and 
yet no longer speaking, with the marks of the lash upon 
thy shoulders, with the nails of the boots of hangmen 
printed on thy body, naked and soiled and equal to a dead 
thing, an object of hatred, an object of derision; alas! it 
is at this hour, native land, that the heart of the proscribed 
overflows with love and respect for thee! There thou art, 
motionless! The man of despotism and oppression laughs 
and tastes the proud illusion of no longer fearing thee. 
Rapid joys. The peoples who are in the darkness 
forget the past, and only see the present and despise 
thee. Forgive them ; they know not what they do. De- 
spise thee! Great God, despise France! And who are 
they? What language do they speak? What books do 
they hold in their hands? What names do they know by 
heart? What is the post-bill pasted on the walls of their 
theatres? What form do their arts, their laws, their 
manners, their garments, their pleasures, their fashions, 
have? What is the great date for them as for us? ’89! 
If they take France out of their souls, what will remain to 
them? O, peoples! though she be fallen, and fallen for- 


304 Napoleon the Little. 


ever, do they despise Greece ? Do they despise Italy? Do 
they despise France ? 

Look at those breasts; they are your nurse. Look at 
that womb ; it is your mother. If she sleeps, if she is in 
lethargy ; silence, and stand uncovered. If she is dead ; on 
your knees ! 

The exiles are scattered ; destiny has blasts that scatter 
men as a hand scatters ashes. Some are in Belgium, 
some in Piedmont, some in Switzerland, where they have 
no liberty ; others are in London, where they have no roof. 
This one, a peasant, has been torn from his native enclo- 
sure ; this one, a soldier, has no longer anything but the 
handle of his sword, for his sword they have broken ; this 
one, a workman, does not know the language of the coun- 
try ; he is without clothes, and without shoes; he does not 
know whether he will eat to-morrow ; this one has left a 
wife and children, beloved group, the object for which 
he labours, the joy of his life ; this one has an old mother, 
with white hair, who is weeping for him; that one has an 
old father, who will die without having seen him again ; 
this other, loved, he has left behind him an adored being, 
who will forget him ; they raise their heads, they stretch out 
their hands to each other, they smile ; there are no people 
who do not step aside wit respect when they pass, and 
who do not view with profound tenderness, as one of the 
most beautiful sights which fortune can give to men, all 
these peaceful consciences, all these broken hearts. 

They suffer, they are silent ; in them the citizen has sac- 
rificed the man ; they look fixedly at adversity ; they do 
not even cry under the pitiless rod of misfortune: ‘‘ Cwes 
romanus sum ,’ but in the evening, when one thinks, when 


Napoleon the Little. 305 


all in the strange city puts on sadness, for what seems 
cold by day becomes funereal by twilight; in the night, 
when one does not sleep, souls the most stoical open 
to grief and dejection. Where are the little children? 
Who will give them bread? Who will give them their 
father’s kiss? Where is the wife? Where is the mother? 
Where is the brother? Where are they all? And those 
songs that one used to hear in the evening in their native 
language, where are they ? 

Where is the wood, the tree, the path, the roof full of 
nests, the bell surrounded by tombs? Where is the street, 
where is the faubourg, the lamp lighted before your door, 
the friends, the workshop, the trade, the accustomed work ? 
And the furniture sold at public notice, the auction invad- 
ing the domestic sanctuary! Oh what farewells forever! 
destroyed, dead, thrown to the four winds, that moral 
being which they call the hearth of a family, and which 
is not only composed of prattlings, tendernesses, and of 
embraces, but also of hours, and habits, of the visits of 
friends, of the laughter of one, of the pressure of another’s 
hand, of the view that one saw from such a window, 
of the place where a familiar object stood, of the arm- 
chair where your grandfather sat, of the carpet on which 
your first-born has played! Flown away are all those objects 
on which your life was imprinted! Vanished, the visible 
form of recollections! There are in grief inward and ob- 
scure, sides where the boldest courage bends. The orator 
of Rome bent his head without growing pale to the knife 
of the centurion Lenas; but he wept when he thought that 
his house would be destroyed by Clodius. The proscribed 
are silent; or, if they mourn, it is only among them- 


306 Napoleon the Little. 


selves. As they know each other, and know that they are 
doubly brothers, having the same country and the same 
proscription, they relate to each other their miseries. He 
who has money divides with those who have none ; he who 
has firmness gives it to those who lack it. They exchange 
reminiscences, aspirations, hopes. They turn, with their 
arms stretched out into the shadow, toward what they have 
left behind them. Ah! how happy they are down there, 
those who think no longer of us! Each one suffers, and, 
at moments, becomes impassioned. 

They engrave on all memories the names of all the 
hangmen. [Each one has something that he curses: 
Mazas, the hulks, the casemates, the informer who betrayed 
the spy who lay in ambush, the gendarme who arrested, 
Lambessa where one has a friend, Cayenne where one has 
a brother ; but there is one thing that they bless all and 
with one accord, it is thou, France! Oh! a complaint, 
a word against thee, France! No, no, no! One has never 
more of country in his heart than when he is in exile. 
They will do their whole duty with a tranquil forehead and 
an unshaken perseverance. Never to see thee again, that 
is their sorrow ; never to forget thee, that is their joy. 

Ah, what mourning ! and after eight months it is in vain 
that one tells himself it is so; it is in vain that one looks 
around him and sees the spire of St. Michael instead of the 
Pantheon, and St. Gudule instead of Notre Dame; one 
does not believe it! So it istrue ; we cannot deny it, we 
must agree to it, we must recognize it, though one die of 
humiliation and despair, that which you see there on the 
ground is the nineteenth century—it is France! What! 
And this Bonaparte has done this ruin ! 


— 


Napoleon the Little. 307 


What ! is it in the centre of the greatest people on earth, 
is it in the middle of the greatest century of history, that 
this personage has stood erect and triumphed, to make a 
prey for himself out of France? Great God! What the 
eagle dreaded to take in his talons, the parrot has taken in 
his claw! What! Louis XI. miscarried at it! Richelieu 
was broken upon it! Napoleon was not sufficient for it! 
In a day, from evening until morning, the absurd has been 
‘the possible. All that was axiom has become chimera. 
All that was lie has become actual fact. What! the most 
brilliant concourse of men! the most magnificent move- 
ment of ideas! the most formidable chain of events! 
what no Titan could have restrained, what no Hercules 
could have overthrown, the human stream in flood, the 
French billow advancing, civilization, progress, intelli- 
gence, revolution, liberty, 4e arrested one fine morning, 
purely and simply and neatly; he, this mask, this dwarf, 
this abortive Tiberius, this nothing! 

God was marching on, Louis Bonaparte, with crest 
erect, put himself across the path and says to God: 
‘“«Thou shalt go no further!” God stopped. And you 
imagine that that was so! and you imagine that this plebis- 
citum exists, that this Constitution of, I no longer know 
what day of January, exists, that this Senate exists, that this 
Council of State and this Corps Legislatif exist! You 
imagine that there is a lackey whose name is Rouher, a 
valet whose name is Troplong, an eunuch whose name is 
Baroche, and a sultan, a pacha, a master who is called 
Louis Bonaparte! You do not see what all this chimera 
is! You do not see that the 2d of December is only an 


immense delusion, a pause, a time of rest, a sort of curtain 





308 Napoleon the Little. 


behind which God, the marvellous machinist, is preparing 
and constructing the last act, the supreme and triumphal 
act of the French revolution! You are looking stupidly 
at the curtain, at the thing painted on the coarse canvas, 
the nose of one, the epaulets of another, the great sabre of 
a third, the laced Cologne-water tradesmen that you call 
generals, those poosahs that you call magistrates, those 
good-natured men that you call senators; this mixture of 
caricatures and spectres, you take them for a reality! 
And you do not hear over there, in the shadow, that deep 
sound! You do not see some one who comes and goes ! 
You do not see the curtain tremble at the breath of him 
who is behind it! 


THE END. 





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